Experiences on collaborative quality enhancement using cross-sparring between two universities

Aston University and Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS), together with six other partners, participated in an Erasmus+ funded project aimed at developing a collaborative, comprehensive and accessible evaluation process model for HEIs to use in their Quality Assurance and Enhancement. As a part of the project, the developed model has been piloted by the participating universities. The starting point for these pilots was a self-evaluation exercise inspired by the CDIO self-evaluation model. Whilst completing the self-evaluation, the participants also defined a set of criteria particularly relevant and of interest for the further development of their activities. After the self-evaluation phase, each institution was paired with another institution that provided a best fit concerning the strengths and development areas of the other based on the respective self-evaluation results,. Thereafter, the so called cross-sparring visits took place. In this paper, the experiences of the self-evaluation process as well as of the cross-sparring visits between Aston University and Turku University of Applied Sciences are reported. The process and practical arrangements of the visits are described, and the key findings based on the cross-sparring results are discussed.