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The Forum’s commitment to developing and promoting standards of good practice for the field of education abroad lies at the core of the Forum’s mission. Less than one year after the Forum was created, a July 2002 poll of Forum members identified " standards in the field of education abroad " as one of the the critical issues in the field.
As a response, the Standards Committee was created to draft a comprehensive set of standards of good practice for education abroad. The group drafted the first edition of the Standards in 2004. In late 2004, the Forum commissioned from Leventhal Strategies a survey of education abroad standards of various US accrediting agencies. In 2005, the Committee revised the Standards for the second editionwhich was published in 2005.
In January 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Anti-Trust Division and Federal Trade Commission designated the Forum as the Standards Development Organization (SDO) for the field of education abroad.
In January 2006, the Forum began testing the Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad, based on the 2005 second edition, in a Pilot Project with a group of volunteer institutional participants – domestic and overseas providers, domestic and overseas universities and colleges, community colleges and consortia. The results of this landmark Project were presented and discussed at the Forum Conference in Austin, Texas, March 1 – 3, 2007.
Feedback obtained during the Pilot Project, together with the ongoing efforts of the Standards Committee, led by Chair Michael Steinberg, has resulted in the third edition of The Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad (2008). This document, available currently only in pdf format, will be distributed to Forum members in print version in Spring 2008.
On July 14, 2007, the Forum's Board of Directors formally adopted the Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad.
Financial support for the development and testing of the Standards has been provided by generous grants from the IFSA Foundation.
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