On Wednesday September 05, 2018, the body of Quality Assurance (called ‘apparatus of Supervision and Quality Assurance’ at MHE) has organized a meeting at EPU, Erbil. The meeting was attended by Minister of HE, Dr. Yousif Goran, Head of Quality Assurance (QA) Body, Dr. Mohammed Husein, Vice-presidents for Scientific Affairs of all KRG universities, QA directors and Health and Safety (H&S) directors of all KRG universities. Dr. Mehmet Ozdemir, Academic Vice President, Dr. Sameerah T. Saaed, QA Director and Mr. Baban Jamal, Director of H&S from Tishk International university attended the meeting.

QA and H&S are significant processes that form part of the Ministry’s main strategies, and thus they need to be well managed and continually scrutinized to boost the quality of education process at the universities and institutes. This can be achieved through utilizing the experience of the world universities in the developed countries so as to reach higher world education standards and achieve better positions in the world universities ranking.

Dr. Yousif Goran presented a speech to the attendees mentioning some important points:

• Iraq and the Association of Arab Universities (AAU) are making use of NUR-KRG criteria and methodology. Recently Iraq and AAU have started to plan to establish a ranking for all Arab universities.

 

• Kurdistan is pioneer in this regard as it has started and ran the National Ranking of Universities three years ago successfully. This is a great achievement for all public and private universities. Throughout Middle East and Arab countries only Turkey has got a national ranking for its universities.

In October and for the third time MHE will announce the results of NUR. Based on the data provided, there is a progress in the performance of KRG Universities, specifically in terms of scientific publications. The purpose of this ranking is not to show the superiority of one university to another; it is rather to establish and enhance the culture of scientific publications and participate in the world researching process. Hopefully Tishk International university were in the first group in the previous year.

• Universities should plan to get accreditation certificates from international academic agencies. At Ministry they aim to support all universities and institutes to get internal, regional or international accreditation. Tishk International University was mentioned to have achieved accreditation for some of its programs like Civil Engineering, Law Faculty.

The QA body at MHE needs to supervise/audit public universities in the same way as it does for the private universities and institutes as stated in the Ministry law. The supervision should include Bachelor, Master and PhD programs and practiced according to the standards set by MHE.

In the second part, the head of the QA Body at MHE-KRG presented the vision, mission and objectives of the Body. He also presented a new ranking process which will be managed daily by universities. The results are shown daily through a special software program established by MHE.

An open discussion between the head of QA and representatives of universities were made. he answered the questions of the attendees. They all hoped to increase the quality of educations in the KRG universities.