ACPUA from the region Aragon in Spain was admitted as new member of ECA on 30 June 2016. ACPUA is the acronym of Agencia de Calidad y Prospectiva Universitaria de Aragón or in English Aragon Agency for Quality Assurance and Strategic Foresight in Higher Education. At the meeting in Santiago de Compostela ACPUA was represented by the Director Antonio Serrano González.
ACPUA was created by the Aragon Higher Education Act (art. 84) to be an instrument “to promote the improvement of the quality of the Aragon university system”. Following this legal mandate, ACPUA’s activity can be classified in three areas:
1) Quality assurance: quality assurance evaluations and reviews in three fields: programmes, institutions and research. Progressively, ACPUA has developed new evaluation tasks within each of them; programme evaluation is the most relevant one.
2)Strategic foresight: ACPUA develops different types of reports and studies to support higher education policy decisions upon request of the Aragon Government, as well as research studies on key topics upon the authority’s request.
3) Outreach activities: ACPUA supplements its QA and strategic foresight activity through a complementary mission: promoting quality in higher education by organizing seminars, collaborating with other entities through networks, participating in higher education events, etc.
ECA welcomes ACPUA as the 17th member agency.
