Quality Council

The quality council is composed of 6 independent international higher education and diversity management experts who were nominated by the participating partners in line with their significant expertise. They are supposed to review deliverables and intellectual outputs to guarantee relevant and high quality content and are asked to provide feedback to ensure sustainable implementation of output. Their perspective should help to embrace other stakeholder’s viewpoints (politics, quality assurance, corporate setting).

Members of the Quality Council:

Dr. Maria Keplinger is head of an expert unit on higher education development in the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy. She was project manager for the national strategy development process on the social dimension of higher education.

Dr. Nicole Auferkorte-Michaelis is CEO of Center of Higher Education and Quality Department of University of Duisburg-Essen.

Dr. Anke Rigbers is CEO and head of the accreditation department of evalag – Evaluation Agency Baden-Württemberg. The range of services offered by evalag includes certification procedures such as programme and system accreditation in Germany and abroad, comprehensive advisory and support offerings for QM and organisational development at HEIs. Dr. Rigbers has expertise in higher education quality management and quality assurance, organisational development of higher education institutions.

Dr. Pauline Hanesworth is Academic Lead, Equality and Diversity / TEF at Higher Education Academy. She joined the HEA in 2013 to manage the Scottish project on embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum (EEDC). She has expertise in access and inclusion, admission to higher education, curriculum design, equality and diversity, humanities disciplines (especially Classics, History and Archaeology), and teaching pedagogies.

Paddy Turner is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and for over 5yrs has been Chair of the National Association of Disability Practitioners (a membership organisation that represents disability workers supporting disabled students and staff) and in this role sits on various Government Department stakeholder groups. He has worked at Sheffield Hallam University within the Disability field since becoming a BSL Interpreter in 1998 but has gradually shifted into an Education Development role responsible for advancing inclusive teaching practice for all, both at strategic and practitioner level. He contributes to the UK Department for Education‘s Disabled Student Strategic Leadership Group as an inclusion expert and speaks at numerous conferences both in the UK and abroad on the subject.

Dr. Helena Kasurinen has a long work history as a researcher and trainer at university and national administration in Finland. She has worked as a project manager in several national and international projects dealing with assessment criteria and quality assurance of guidance services and has evaluated the content of the curriculum in the career counsellor training programme. In 2001 she was analysing the Finnish respondents’ answers for OECD survey: Career Guidance and Public Policy. Bridging the gap (2004).