Excerpt from article of The Daily Star - Lebanon News, February 21, 2007
BEIRUT: A project aimed at enhancing higher education in Lebanon was launched on Tuesday with funding from Tempus, the European Union's program for cooperation in higher learning (see earlier post on this blog about Tempus).
In a conference held at UNESCO Palace in Beirut, the Quality Assurance for Higher Education in Lebanon (QAHEL) was introduced as a new way to "enhance the quality of participating universities and the system of higher learning in Lebanon," according to Dr. Mohammad Loutfi, the administrator of the project grant.
"The idea is to use Europe's experience in the field to illustrate the advantages and problems linked to the development of quality management in higher education," he said.
While European expertise is deemed necessary for the elaboration of standards and practices in the field, resolutions will not be imposed by the EU on Lebanon. The standards will only be used as benchmarks to elaborate Lebanon's own standards and practices.
"The Bologna Process - initiated in 1999 by the European ministers of education that rendered the different systems of education governing universities across the EU more compatible and comparable - will only be used as a general guideline for the work to be carried out by the participants in QAHEL over the coming year," professor Andris Barblan, the ex-secretary general of the Association of European Universities, told The Daily Star...
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