Academic continuing education and lifelong learning have become increasingly important for higher education institutions in recent years. At the latest with the federal-state competition “Advancement through Education: Open University”, this is also strongly supported by politicians. The increasing institutionalization of further education offers at higher education institutions raises the question of which quality standards can be used as a basis for further education study programmes and certificates – not least because part-time, online-based learning arrangements have non-traditional students as their target group and are increasingly being offered across national borders. The question arises as to whether the previous quality requirements from undergraduate teaching are also valid for continuing academic education or whether specific standards are required.
Program:
In the course of the Quality Dialogue on 16 September 2019, Prof. Dr. R. Grimm (Chairman of the Accreditation Council) gave a welcoming address, followed by two inputs: Prof. Dr. Heinke Röbken (University of Oldenburg) spoke on the topic of “Quality standards in academic continuing education and their implementation in the context of the mint.online and PuG projects”. The two joint projects were coordinated by the University of Oldenburg as part of the federal-state competition “Advancement through Education: Open University” and aim to establish part-time study programs in STEM subjects and nursing and health sciences. The subsequent presentation by Dr. Anke Rigbers (evalag) focused on the certification of academic continuing education programs.
After a discussion, the participants were then able to become active themselves in two parallel workshops: Workshop A dealt with the topic of “Quality standards and quality assurance in academic continuing education”; in Workshop B, “Quality assurance of academic continuing education in system accreditation” was discussed. The quality dialog ended with a review of the results.