November 25th the tenth meeting of the Caribbean Leadership Network in HealtCare took place on the friendly island of Sint Eustatius. The Sint Eustatius Health Care Foundation hosted the meeting and Mademi Velland from VTV Consultancy was the facilitator. She is the new secretary of SYNERGY. Over twenty participants joined the meeting coming from healthcare institutes on Sint Maarten, Statia and Bonaire.
The theme of the day was ‘Technology in Healthcare’. A presentation and workshop was given by Marga Nonneman, specialist in geriatric care. Members of SYNERGY can find the agenda, power point and evaluation results as well as a short video, greeting the former secretary, on the protected website http//:www.synergy-act.nl .
For those interested in the practice of the Concept of the Four Quality Paradigms in Higher Education I produced an AI generated ‘deep dive’ podcast by using NotebookLM , based on Van Kemenade, E.A. (2025). Sane Quality Management in a Crazy World: Bridging gaps, using the Concept of the Four Quality Paradigms (CFQP), Chapter eight in: Marrouchi M. and Haroon, H.A. (eds), Quality Assurance in Higher Education; Facts, Concepts and Perspectives. Listen here……
Every six weeks Wittenborg University organises bachelor and master theses defence sessions. As external marker I am involved in the process. Reading the theses, judging its quality and thinking of questions to pose to the student. An interesting job that keeps you up to date with latest developments in MBA programs.
Last 10th of October amongst others these two students graduated: Lilian Azzam and Nikhil S. Chougule. Lilian studied The Fast Fashion Trap: How Strategic Marketing Fuels the Culture of Disposable Trends and Non-Sustainable Purchasing Behaviour Among Young Consumers.
Nikhil studied The impact of social media marketing strategies on export performance of manufacturing SMEs in India.
Congratulations to both. It is a great honour to be part of this.
On June 2nd and June 3rd a small workshop for CLEAR+ National Agency members and assessors took place in Napels, Italy. CLEAR+ aims to improve the assessment process of ERASMUS+ by programme-level updates, learning from experience and use of digital tools and software to deliver complementary, multi-media and multi-language resources. The Italian National Agency (INDIRE) took care of the practical organisation and Paul Guest was the trainer and moderator of the process (in the middle of the photo). The group consisted of eleven managers, five internal assessors and twenty external assessors from all levels of education, including adult education. Nine countries were represented (Romania, Cyprus, Norway, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Poland and the Netherlands). Four participants were Dutch (on the sides of the photo).
Dutch participants and the trainer
A model of design rethinking was used, that consisted of four steps, three diverging and 1 converging:
Scoping successes and challenges
Mapping problems and difficulties
Suggesting and proposing solutions
Realistic action planning
The group worked hard to define problems in the assessing process and to suggest solutions. Problems relate for instance to unclarity of some of the guidelines; to the lack of smart indicators in the final reports and unclarity of required documents for final report assessment as well as the lack of exchanging experiences between assessors. Solutions suggested were improvement of the guidelines; more training and support for assessors, training for benificiaries (as well as assessors) on smart indicators, and to update and circulate CLEAR+ final report briefing sheets. The second day the group discussed the future, regarding the use of AI (e.g. for translation) and regarding topics for videos (and podcasts) to support assessors.
From Monday 14th of April 2025 till Wednesday 16th I was invited to Zagreb (Croatia) to be a member of the auditteam that was assigned by the Agency for Science and Higher Education (AZVO) to assess the initial accreditation of an associate degree course on applied economics.
On Tuesday, the two year course, 120 ECTS, was presented by the management, teachers and external stakeholders. Of course, a visit to the premises was part of the audit. Since it concerns an online course, a focus especially was on the facilities for webinars, online assessments and such. The audit team drafted a concept of the report on Wednesday morning.
