Collaboration Between Student Quality Assurance Pools

Embedding Improvement and Enhancing Quality of Student QA Pools in Germany, Switzerland and Austria

The internationalisation of quality assurance in the European higher education area greatly impacts students’ participation. Since 2000, several student unions in Europe have established ‘student quality assurance pools’ (QA pools) to enhance student expertise and participation in higher education quality assurance (QA). With the increase in internationalisation, we see a need for collaboration between these QA pools. In this article we present the collaboration between student expert pools in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (DACH). We demonstrate the advantages of better training events and regular exchanges of experience within the DACH collaboration to increase awareness of student participation in QA procedures. Additionally, we provide detailed information about the challenges that should be addressed by the DACH collaboration, including limited resources, insufficient knowledge transfers and the lack of tools for international QA training. This article could help other countries, agencies and organisations in QA to establish and support such collaborations.