The External Reviewing Board (ERB) of the 4EU+ Alliance is an expert panel of critical friends and as such constitutes an integral part of the alliance governance structure. It is responsible for externally reviewing the alliance, which comprises the external evaluation and monitoring of the Alliance’s quality management system 4EU+QUALITY on the background of the Alliance’s strategic goals.
In this role, it acts independently on the following main tasks:
evaluating and monitoring the quality management system of the Alliance as critical friends: giving recommendations on how the Alliance can further develop its processes and its quality in line with the Alliance’s strategic goals and vision and in line with the European framework;
assessing the Alliance’s decision-making process, by confirming the plausibility & adequacy of the Alliance decision-making process concerning its educational offer;
certification of the quality management system of the Alliance.
The ERB consists of five international experts with professional expertise in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and quality assurance, without any affiliation to the 4EU+ member universities and countries. Two members are professors, two members are students and one member is a professional in quality assurance on a European level.
Ana Gvritishvili is a member of the Executive Committee of ESU and has over 6 years of experience in the field of higher education and quality assurance field. She became a member of the ESU Quality Assurance Student Experts' Pool in 2020. Since 2017, she is a member of the National Center for Educational Quality Enhancement of Georgia’s student expert pool. In these roles, she gained experience in internal and external quality assurance and expert pool management and actively took part in national and international institutional and programme reviews. She is a PhD student in the Economics programme at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.
Julie Hall, Professor of Higher Education, has been working on quality assurance and higher education for over 25 years. As the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) of London Metropolitan University, she leads the University’s academic activities and ensures its quality of education focusing on inclusive teaching and learning. For this work, she was awarded the National Teaching Fellowship in 2014. Between 2010 and 2014, she was Chair of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), the professional association for staff and educational developers in the UK, promoting innovation and good practice in higher education. She has also been involved in higher education and quality assurance in various roles at different renowned higher education institutions in the UK and internationally. She has a background in sociology and does research in the field of Higher Education. Julie’s external review focus is on the use of student feedback and the links between the classroom experience and learning and teaching Strategy.
Maria Kelo is the Director of the Institutional Development Unit of the European University Association (EUA) as well as the Director of the Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP), which is an independent QA agency registered in the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR). She has over 15 years of experience in quality assurance and international higher education policy. In March 2022, she became a member of the Swiss Accreditation Council. Before, she served as the Director of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education for over a decade and as a member of the Board of the EQAR from 2013 to 2020, and again from 2022 onwards. Before that, she worked in the field of international higher education in various European organizations and as a private consultant.
Terhi Nokkala is a Research Professor at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research (FIER) at the University of Jyväskylä. She has over 15 years of experience in quality assurance and higher education, serving, for example, as a member of national or international expert groups, evaluation or steering committees for the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education and the Institutional Evaluation Programme of the European University Association. She is interested especially in the role of quality assurance in organizational capacity building. Her research focuses on the interplay between higher education policy and governance, organizational parameters and networks, and academic work, with a specific interest in sustainability, comparative methodology and discourse analysis.
Johannes Schützenhofer is a member of the Executive Team of the National Student Union of Austria (ÖH). He has gained over 4 years of experience in higher education and quality assurance. Since 2020, he is a member of Austria’s Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool and has already worked with quality assurance on the level of European University Alliances as a student board member of the EPICUR alliance. In addition, he has been actively involved in the development of higher education as a student representative at his home university, thus partaking in reviewing procedures at the university level. He is currently completing his diploma in Environmental Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.