Quality Management and Evaluation

Internal Quality Evaluation

    Report on Quality Assurance and Internal Quality Evaluation of the BUT

    EUA evaluation

    International external quality evaluation of EUA before the amendment of the Higher Education Act

    The international evaluation of EUA/IEP (European University Association/Institutional Evaluation Programme) was carried out at the BUT several times, in 2004/2005 as a full evaluation and in 2010/2011 as a re-evaluation. The BUT management approached the EUA/IEP evaluation mainly for the following reasons:

    • The long-term (strategic) plan of the BUT (and its annual update/implementation plan) regularly obliges the university management, among other things, to continuously improve the management system of the entire university.
    • By taking an external and independent view of the implementation of the BUT's strategic objectives, the management has obtained an objective evaluation of the quality of the BUT.
    • The international evaluation has contributed to much more systematic and long-term work on the preparation of the BUT Long-term Plan.
    • The evaluation was a further step towards the harmonisation of Czech technical higher education with universities in other EU countries and subsequent identification of the strategic position of the BUT among European universities.
    • The BUT received a benchmarking tool to compare the quality of the BUT with several Czech universities that have undergone EUA evaluation.
    • The EUA evaluation enabled a practical comparison of the EUA methodologies with the methodologies developed by the research staff of the BUT under the guidance of the CSVŠ (Centre for the Study of Higher Education, v. v. i.) in the framework of the project "Quality Assessment of Higher Education Institutions".

    EUA/IEP International External Quality Evaluation (2017-2018)

    IEP (Institutional Evaluation Programme) is registered with EQAR (European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education), is a member of ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) and is an external evaluator of quality, supporting institutions in the ongoing development of their strategic management, quality assurance and internal quality evaluation to improve activities and outcomes.

    The independent evaluation by international experts and their external view of the University will (as in the past) be a relevant basis for the BUT management to systematically improve the quality of activities and the long-term development strategies of the University, as well as to prepare the BUT Strategic Plan for the period 2020-2024. An important reason for the BUT self-evaluation and international external evaluation is also the ambition of the BUT to obtain institutional accreditation (according to the amendment of the Act on Higher Education Institutions in the Czech Republic, EUA/IEP findings may be beneficial for this purpose). Another reason for the evaluation is the intention to harmonise the BUT with the international environment of mainly European universities in order to gradually identify its strategic position.

    Scope of the evaluation:

    The IEP focuses on the institution as a whole (it does not evaluate individual programmes) and covers the following areas: management and decision-making, quality, teaching and learning, creative activity, relationship to society and internationalisation.

    The BUT self-evaluation team has been assembled to provide a representative platform of opinion that allows for a maximally objective view of the university and its processes. The composition of the self-evaluation team was discussed by the University management and approved by the Rector.

    The IEP evaluation is based on 4 key questions:

    1. What does the institution do? (Vision, goals and their justification, how the institution sees itself locally, nationally and internationally).
    2. How does the institution do it? (Processes, procedures, practices and analysis of their effectiveness.)
    3. How does the institution know it is working? (Feedback, QA mechanisms, evaluation of results achieved.)
    4. What does the institution intend to do next to improve? (Strategic planning, willingness to embrace change.)

    Evaluation process:

    The self-evaluation team produced a BUT self-evaluation report, including a university-wide SWOT analysis, which was delivered as a primary source of information to the EUA/IEP evaluators. The evaluation team will conduct 2 on-site visits in the first half of 2018. The first visit (2 days) serves to get an overall impression of how the HEI works and to understand the context in which the HEI operates, while the second visit (3 days) explores in more depth the key issues that emerged during the first visit. At the end of the second visit, the EUA/IEP evaluation team will provide a verbal evaluation report to the BUT management, followed by a written evaluation report identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the BUT from the perspective of the international external evaluators, with design suggestions for future solutions. This final evaluation report of the BUT (after checking for factual errors by the BUT) will be officially published on the EUA/IEP website.

    The BUT has good experience with the EUA/IEP programme, having undergone the same evaluation process for the first time in 2005 and a subsequent re-evaluation in 2011. The findings and recommendations of the evaluators at that time have been used to advantage in its future activities.

    Responsibility: Mgr. Kamil Gregorek, MBA