The Rector, Prof. Maria Amata Garito signs the constituent charter of the new international Consortium in Dubai
During the opening ceremony of the Innovation Arabia Conference, organized in Dubai by the HBMSU – Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University - the first International Consortium aimed at establishing specific criteria, allowing to identify, in scientific terms, the quality benchmarks on which the structures and systems for the evaluation distance universities on the Internet at a global level must be based, is born.
The new Consortium is born with the support of the Ministry of Education and the Agency for the Assessment of the Quality of the Universities of the United Arab Emirates; among the founding members: the Association of the Arab Universities (AArU), the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), the Asian Association of the Open Universities, the Arab Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL), the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) of Dubai and the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO, represented in Dubai by the Rector, Prof. Maria Amata Garito, who represented the EADTU as well.
Among the objectives of the new consortium, there is support from National Evaluation Agencies in identifying common criteria, at a global level, for online universities’ quality assessment. The International Telematic University UNINETTUNO was chosen among the founding members because of its online university model, recognized by the international scientific community, as well as because, since many years, it has been conducting research activities in the field of quality in e-learning and already contributed to defining, thanks to the E-xcellence and E-xcellence+ Projects, coordinated by the EADTU, the benchmarks for assessing the distance and blended model at European level. UNINETTUNO keeps on conducting research work in this field and many are the publications in renowned international journals in which the quality assessment benchmarks are presented and which are regularly used by the University’s Board of Evaluation. Actually, today, UNINETTUNO is the only Italian online university that passed, earning a very positive assessment, the evaluation test the ANVUR – National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research System.
UNINETTUNO’s Rector, Professor Garito, commented the ceremony of signature of the constituent charter of the new Consortium for the Quality of Online Universities: “As it happens with the fight against fake news, it is high time to create a movement to fight against fake education in the Internet. Every day, new online universities and new Internet-based teaching courses are created; however, clear information on teaching methodologies, psycho-pedagogic models, names and curricula of those authoring the contents are lacking. Many of these universities are not accredited by their Governments and often issue study qualifications that are not legal and supply skills not in line with their promises. By now, online education has become a global business and, more than to quality, entrepreneurs in this field look at their business success. As members of the international scientific and academic community, we have an obligation to protect both the students from fake online education as well as the academic world, the reputation of the true online universities that are growing more and more at global level and are more and more characterizing themselves as a winning model of the University of the XXI Century.”
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