Bologna Process Working Group

The aim of the Bologna Agreement of 1999 is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of higher education in Europe.

NAIRTL has set up a working group on the Bologna process with the aim of:

• developing principles that will guide the process of establishing active links with the Bologna Process to advance progress on implementing the action lines by 2009.
• providing advice on issues relating to the Bologna process
• developing documents, guidelines, workshops etc. as appropriate.

Working group members are listed to the left.

The Bologna Working Group have been involved in a number of actions as detailed below:

Symposium 2009 "Integrating Competences into the Curriculum"
The Bologna Symposium examined national and international examples of how generic competences could be integrated, taught and assessed in Higher Education Institutes in Ireland. Details of the programme and presentations are available here.

Survey: Investigating Graduate Competences
We carried out a national online survey over a two month period to solicit the views of staff and students within 38 Higher Education Institutes and associated employers on their perceptions of the importance of equipping students with various competences. Nearly 2700 survey responses were gathered from employers and the higher education sector and the survey report is available here.

2009 CELT conference
The working group organised three workshops at the CELT conference " Design for Learning: Curriculum and Assessment in Higher Education" which took place in NUI Galway from the 11-12th of June, 2009. The first workshop entitled "Knowledge Transfer - Tuning to Generic Competences" featured presentations from Prof. Paul Ryan (NUI Galway) and Dr Alan Hegarty (UL) of the EU project "Tuning Educational Structures in Europe". Workshop 2 focussed on the question of how generic competences could be embedded in Ireland and was chaired by Dr. Stephen Cassidy (CIT), NAIRTL Working group member. The third workshop ""Building Ireland's Smart Graduate - Stakeholder Perspectives: policy and practice" featured short presentations from an industry representative (Paul Scanlon, Nortel Networks), a policy maker (Oliver Mooney, Policy and Planning, HEA) and a student (Hugh Sullivan, Education Officer, Students' Union, TCD), the final workshop gathered a range of opinions on generic competences. The workshop presentations can be downloaded from here.

2008 CIT symposium
The working group organised a symposium provocativly entitled Will your qualification be recognised? which took place on 12th May 2008 at Cork Institute of Technology. The second symposium focusing on Bologna and Staff Development was held in Trinity College Dublin on December 5th 2008. A publication including the proceedings of both events is available to order from the NAIRTL website.

We wish to express our gratitude to the members of the working group for all their hard work and commitment which has led to a publication on the proceedings of two of the Bologna Symposia "Will your qualification be recognised?" and "Bologna and Staff Development" as well as videos from all three symposia. Please go to www.nairtl.ie/Resources to access these.