 goals of the Process is to use higher education to help develop and strengthen the identity of the European area. To this end, the Process seeks to make it easier for students in Europe to move from institutions in one country to those in another, encouraging them to think of themselves as “European” students rather than specifically “French”, “Hungarian” or otherwise. Education should move across national boundaries (at least within the EHEA) as easily as capital or goods. Thus the major educational initiative of the Process is to facilitate such mobility by bringing increased uniformity to definitions of academic courses and degrees and to quality control.
This is an enormously complex task, since the Process recognizes that the goal is not to “standardize” courses and degrees by removing variation, history and context from offerings, but rather to provide a set of reference points that enable one institution to evaluate clearly the educational attainments of a student from another institution. In Adelman’s terms, the goal is to harmonize, not standardize.
The process of harmonization plays out at several levels. This effort begins with a Framework for Qualifications of various generic degrees (e.g. bachelor’s, master’s, or more correctly, first cycle, second cycle), which are related to one another by a “ratchet” principle – that is, each higher degree relates to the previous one, but with higher levels of attainment. As Adelman writes:
Under the Framework for Qualifications there are five learning outcome constructs, each of which evidences the “ratchet principle” in their descriptions:
- The reference points of “knowledge and understanding”;
- The contexts and modes of application of knowledge and understanding;
- Fluency in the use of increasingly complex data and information;
- Breadth and depth of topics communicated, along with the range of audiences for that communication; and
- Degree of autonomy gained for subsequent learning.
As one moves up through the texts of the credential ladder, one notes the fading of occupational orientation, the emergence of social and ethical dimensions of learning, and the passage from well-defined contexts and problems to more fluid and dynamic contexts and problems.
The 46 countries of the EHEA have agreed to standards with respect to these learning outcomes that describe each degree cycle, and educational institutions within that region have agreed that they now have a responsibility to demonstrate that their graduating students have indeed attained the desired levels of learning. How they demonstrate it is largely left up to the institutions, but what they need to demonstrate now is commonly accepted. In many cases, nations are moving to set up national qualification frameworks that define how this Framework for Qualifications should be demonstrated nationally to best preserve particular historic and cultural aspects of their higher education systems. In any case, leaving the “how” up to individual institutions and countries has lead to a great deal of creative thinking about outcome measurements.
The challenge then moves to specifying expectations for student learning outcomes for specific degrees (Tuning Project), e.g BA in physics, MS in history. Here, again, the EHEA is advancing. The discussions are understandably difficult, and studies of results thus far are mixed. However, step-by-step advances are being made, leaving the countries involved (which now includes more than the EHEA) with a much clearer understanding than exists in other countries of what needs to be learned in specific fields in the context of today’s realities.
A particularly important component of all of this is the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), started earlier under ERASMUS, but refined and extended for Bologna. A particularly clear and succinct definition of ECTS can be found on the website of Tilburg University:
The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System is a student-centred system based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a programme, objectives prefera