In addition to conducting external quality assurance of the institutions’ educational provision, NOKUT also carries out projects with the sole aim of generating knowledge that may stimulate further enhancement of educational quality.
These activities never involve the question of recognition or possible sanctions for the institutions that are affected. The projects have the sole aim of generating knowledge and insights that may benefit institutions and regulating authorities in their quality improvement work – and NOKUT itself in its fine-tuning of quality assurance mechanisms.
Such activities include:
- Collating and analysing information that NOKUT’s evaluation, accreditation and recognition processes produce, often in combination with other data sources.
- Evaluations with the purpose of assessing quality and identifying relevant improvement measures. These may be broad, national programme evaluations (like the ones carried out on general teacher education and engineering programmes) or they may be theme evaluations, directed at specific aspects of educational practice across different institutions and/or discipline areas.
- R&D projects with the aim of investigating defined phenomena or practices that have an influence on educational quality or the quality of NOKUT’s own processes.
- Workshops, seminars or contributions to public debate in order to disseminate or discuss the results of quality assurance activities, or to direct attention towards current topics and challenges relating to educational quality.
In addition, NOKUT administers the Ministry’s annual Prize for Educational Quality. The prize is awarded to groups of academics or discipline communities that have made outstanding contributions to quality development through the way they run their course or programme.
Contact us with suggestions of R&D projects
NOKUT’s Research and Analysis Department is still in an early stage of development. It is the ambition of the department to maintain close links with the sector and to carry out several of its R&D projects in cooperation with people in the higher education institutions. We invite interested academic or administrative personnel to suggest topics for new projects and to contribute in their execution.
- Head of department: Ole-Jacob Skodvin