From Quality Assurance to Quality Enhancement in the European Higher Education Area

This article focuses on recent trends in quality assurance initiatives, analyses how the European Higher Education Area promotes quality enhancement mechanisms and their implications for quality cultures in universities. It presents and discusses two approaches towards quality enhancement both at the institutional and programme level: 1. Quality Enhancement at programme level: the Tuning approach and 2. Scottish Enhancement‐led Institutional Review. It also argues that current approaches towards quality culture are reorienting the focus from quality assurance towards contextual quality enhancement and that quality enhancement becomes the primary responsibility of universities and university stakeholders.