Quality assurance at Faculty level: finding the balance between HEI-accreditation and transnational program-accreditation

The Faculty of Engineering Science at XXX has a longstanding tradition in engineering education. A wide variety of different engineering programmes are offered both at the Bachelor's level (2), at the Master's level (23) and at the Advanced Master's level (6). Over 3,000 students are trained in line with an academic tradition in which education is strongly based on research. The quality of the education is a top priority of the Faculty. The Faculty strongly wishes to aim for quality assurance at an international level through a transnational accreditation by an international agency. However, because the Faculty is embedded in a major university, which houses about 60 000 students across 16 faculties, the requirements of the national institutional review of XXX (HEI-level) also have to be met. The Faculty developed a quality assurance system where the standards of transnational accreditation as well as the national Higher Education Institutional review were fulfilled. Several challenges were encountered during this development: the 4-year cycle of the national HEI-accreditation had to be integrated in the six-year cycle of the transnational agency; the need for customized quality assurance of the different programmes of the faculty had to be acknowledged. Two main cornerstones for faculty quality assurance were defined: a strong involvement of all stakeholders and well-considered curriculum development. This paper will describe the resulting quality assurance system, the instruments integrated and choices made.