Towards blended external quality assurance agencies: a European experience

Abstract During this pandemic period, many external quality assurance agencies organised their external assessment visits to higher education institutions virtually. This has been an experience that must be valued, determining whether in future it makes sense to continue organising visits virtually or adopting other similar formats. To this end, this article presents the results of a survey carried out among participants in 100 external assessment panels. Four different items have been analysed: satisfaction with different aspects of the virtual site visits, overall satisfaction, the visit of the facilities and the future of virtual visits. The results show that satisfaction with the process is very broad. Moreover, the physical visit to the facilities is still valued very positively. Few statistically significant differences have been found between programme and institutional accreditation processes, which suggests that whatever the future proposal is, it would follow a similar strategy in both cases.