Blog for the third mission

There are several commonly accepted ranking systems for the First and Second Missions, which provide indicators to measure excellence in Higher Education Institutions around the world. Rankings improve quality assurance by allowing the institutions to understand their own performance, develop best practices, and provide effective and efficient value to society. They also provide quality indicators to governments, society and industry. However, there are no commonly agreed indicators or methodologies to assess quality in Third Mission activities.

This project will develop such indicators, promoting excellence in Third Mission activities, and encouraging Higher Education Institutions to share best practices across Europe.

Friday 28 May 2010

recent publication on college rankings

A pritty good report and overview related to rankings.
David Webster’s definition of “academic quality rankings.” For Webster, an academic
quality ranking system has two components:
1. It must be arranged according to some criterion or set of criteria
which the compiler(s) of the list believed measured or reflected academic
quality.
2. It must be a list of the best colleges, universities, or departments
in a field of study, in numerical order according to their supposed
quality, with each school or department having its own individual
rank, not just lumped together with other schools into a handful of
quality classes, groups, or levels
read more:
http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/College_Rankings_History.pdf

Wednesday 26 May 2010

Project Meeting in Torino

The E3M project team had a meeting last week discussing the indicators which were developed within the subroups of the project. We defined tree different dimensions of the third mission: social engagement, continuing education and technology transfer and innovation. We have "nominated" around 100 indicators related to these fields. We will use the Delphi method to reduce the number of indicators and ask external experts about their opinion. This is the upocommig task for the next months. We all are looking forward to the different views and opinions....