On the university strategy in the education quality assurance: Case study

The universities strategy in the context of environment changes e.g. changes of technologies, policies, markets, users etc. has to reflect them as well as formulate the steps, partial objectives and tasks for assuring its position on market. It requires the quality of education, quality of research, the intensive relations with industries and other subjects, fostering relationships with partners as well as finding new ones. Pressures on the universities in the Slovak Republic are intensive and exhaustive. The technologies mainly digital technology change internal and external processes and provide opportunity for transformation. The paper deals with the fields of action of universities in quality assurance context. The university strategy includes the required level of outputs in relation with the inputs and processes. Today the universities define their strategy based on calculation their position on the market — the main source for comparison ranking agencies provide, on the internationalization implemented to the universities processes and on the calculation of university impact on the locality or region. The education quality assurance has become a necessary precondition of the accreditation process as well as for the position in rankings. Each university create its own procedure, using a different methodology. The University of Žilina, Slovakia chose a procedural approach. It was preceded by a detailed analysis of the situation and by the efforts to find examples of best practice at major global and European universities. This led to the creation of an internal system of education quality assurance at the university and to the creation of an original self-assessment tool. The tool would allow the assessment of the immediate level of maturity in the education quality assurance processes by the European Union and also the definition of the objectives of improvements for a next period.