Database of External QA Results (DEQAR)

DEQAR is the Database of External Quality Assurance Results from activities performed by EQAR-registered quality assurance agencies. DEQAR not only collects their reports and decisions but also helps to understand reports in their context by describing the national QA frameworks of the European Higher Education Area countries.

• Check out the DEQAR Essential Info page outlining the whys, hows and for whoms of the database.

Enhancing the Coverage and Connectivity of QA in the EHEA through DEQAR

The development and expansion of the DEQAR database, launched in 2018 and further propelled by the EU co-funded DEQAR project (2017-2019), received a further boost by the approval of a second Erasmus+ project application, DEQAR CONNECT.

The new project, coordinated by EQAR,  includes as partners 17 registered agencies, 4 ENIC NARIC partners, 6 experts and the E4 as associate partners. View all project partners here.

The DEQAR CONNECT project kicked off in March 2020. It focuses on two of the EHEA key commitments, supporting quality assurance and recognition inside the EHEA, and consists of two strands:

1. Expanding coverage to EHEA countries currently under-represented in DEQAR, by supporting the participation of agencies that could not join DEQAR in the first stage.

To this end, the following steps have been undertaken in 2020:

• DEQAR CONNECT kick-off webinar for QA agencies
  The webinar, which took place in May, had three aims: to introduce the project partners, to introduce DEQAR (including the structure, back-end and workflow of the database) and to make an inventory of the (technical) needs of the agencies for the data submission.
• One-on-one peer support by DEQAR experts
  Based on the experts’ field of expertise, the agencies’ needs and their internal information system complexity, eight experts (mentors) were matched with the 16 newcomer agencies in May. Mentors regularly got in touch (online) with “their” agencies for individual support and updates.
• Experts meetings
  Experts themselves met monthly (online) to discuss each agency’s progress in relation to the project, share advise about supporting mentees in overcoming obstacles and draw common grounds on the questions and dilemmas raised by the agencies.
• Virtual peer support meeting
  At the end of September, all partner QA agencies met up virtually to discuss general progress, possible obstacles and solutions for uploading reports and sharing good practice.

2. Enhancing connectivity by exploiting existing synergies and exploring new opportunities to use DEQAR data directly in the recognition workflow, digital credentialing and elsewhere.

The connectivity strand focuses on three initiatives:

• ENIC-NARICs – integration of DEQAR API in their workflow
  After an kick-off webinar in May 2020, ENIC-NARICs partners (CIMEA, CNRED, France Éducation international and Nuffic) started working on how to best connect their systems to DEQAR. Three of them have already tested/piloted the connection and will fully develop it later, while the last one is planning the DEQAR connectivity together with their next (internal) system update. More about the ENIC-NARIC integrations here.
• Europass – creating a compatibility layer
  EQAR is developing an interface for Europass and its Digital Credentials Infrastructure (EDCI), so that DEQAR data can feed directly into the Accreditation Database underlying the EDCI. Several meetings with the Europass team at the Commission (DG EMPL) were held on the interface between DEQAR and the Europass Accreditation Database, and EQAR worked on developing a prototype for the interface.
• Higher Education Data Interoperability Initiative (HEIDI)
  A (virtual) Roundtable on Higher Education Data Interoperability was held in September 2020. Following that, EQAR continued its cooperation with various other European initiatives in the field of HE data in order to work on better connecting existing systems and data sets. As a first concrete problem domain it was agreed to tackle the question of higher education institution identifiers. Based on a number of agreed use cases, a technical group has been working on the requirements for an enhanced approach to identifying higher education institutions in Europe. These are currently under discussion and concrete proposals will be developed on that basis in 2021.

Reports
By the end of 2020 the total number of reports in DEQAR was 57 803.  The total number of reports uploaded during the year 2020 was 11 024.

Agencies
At the end of last year, 40 (out of 49) EQAR-registered agencies had uploaded reports

Higher education institutions (HEIs)
Reports in DEQAR in 2020 covered 2 636 HEIs based in 43 EHEA countries, and 107 higher education institutions based in non 37 EHEA countries.

Coverage
DEQAR had significant coverage of 21 higher education systems by the end of 2020 (an increase of five higher educational systems compared to 2019): Austria, Belgium (Flemish community), Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Slovenia.

Note on “significant coverage”: In these systems, DEQAR includes reports on more than half of the higher education institutions, compared to the total number according to the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) or national lists provided to EQAR. For very small higher education systems (< 5 higher education institutions), significant coverage is considered if the higher education institution(s) is/are the dominant institution(s) in the system and a large proportion of the institution(s) is covered, i.e. not only a small number of programmes.

Report languages
The main languages of reports in DEQAR are:  German (25 853), French (8936), Spanish (7804), English (2540) and Dutch (1984).

Upload methods
Agencies upload most of their reports via CSV (43 935), followed by an API connection (8156) and manual upload (2273).

The following tables provide a detailed breakdown by agency and type of reports.