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Thirty-two Forum members gathered at the Forum headquarters in Carlisle, PA last week to discuss the results of the Forum’s Standards Pilot Project. This “Standards Summit” included representatives from institutions that are participating in the Pilot, peer reviewers who conducted site reviews, members of the Board’s Standard’s Task Force, and representatives from the Standard’s Committee.
Participants arrived in Carlisle on Wednesday evening and attended a welcome dinner on the Dickinson College campus. They were welcomed by Mary Dwyer, Chair of the Forum Board of Directors, who noted that the participants were involved in “groundbreaking work that will shape the future of education abroad.”
The next morning Kathy Sideli, Chair of the Board’s Standards Task Force, presented the history of the Forum’s effort to develop and disseminate Standards, and highlighted important developments, including the Forum being designated the Standards Development Organization (SDO) for education abroad in 2004.
The rest of the morning was spent refining the processes for conducting program and institutional self-studies and peer review visits by sharing lessons learned from the Pilot. The afternoon sessions focused on refining the various areas of the Forum’s Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad. On Friday the participants discussed the Quality Improvement Program (QUIP) for Education Abroad that will begin in 2007, and planned sessions for the Forum Conference in Austin, Texas that will present the final results of the Standards Pilot Program.
“The summit assembled a stellar group of colleagues that engaged in outstanding work on behalf of the field,” said Katharine Krebs, Director of International Education at Binghamton University. “I was proud to be a part of it.”
For Adrian Thomas, Director of Quality at the University of Limerick in Ireland, the Summit “provided the opportunity to meet and discuss the self-study and review processes with many of the other institutions that participated in the project, and now we have an excellent system for moving to the next stage of quality assurance in education abroad.”
“I was energized by the impressive contributions of all who attended the Summit,” said President and CEO Brian Whalen. “This bodes extremely well for the launching of the Forum’s QUIP next year.”
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