The 22nd Annual Joint Meeting of the ENIC and NARIC Networks was held in Bergenz in Austria from June 7th to 9th 2015 with the support of the European Commission, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, ENIC-NARIC Austria and in cooperation with the Vorarlberg region.
The National ENIC-NARIC Office of the Agency for Science and Higher Education – a part of the European Network of Information Centres in the European Region – has since its establishment in 2005 regularly participated in these annual joint meetings, primarily to exchange experience and information on the implementation of the Lisbon Recognition Convention in individual countries, national qualifications frameworks, opportunities to cooperate on European projects and achievement of common goals in European and global higher education.
The ENIC network was founded by the Council of Europe and UNESCO in order to increase academic mobility and improve the quality of the implementation of the Lisbon Recognition Convention. The Network is made up of the national information centres of the Parties to Lisbon Recognition Convention.
A representative of the Agency for Science and Higher Education was one of the participants. The NARIC network of National Academic Recognition Information Centres was established by the European Commission in order to improve academic recognition of qualifications in the EU and EEA member states, together with associate members from Central and Eastern Europe and Cyprus. The goal of the Network is to encourage academic mobility.
The ENIC-NARIC centres are important stakeholders and sources of information, at the European and global level, on the development of higher education, which is why the annual joint meetings, which gather participations from more than 60 countries, are always an important event interesting for the experts as well as the general public.
This year’s joint meeting was opened by Heinz Kasparovsky, president of the Austrian ENIC-NARIC centre who presented the Austrian system of higher education as well as the work of the centre so far. The meeting dealt with various topics, including potential processes and practices of automatic recognition, recognition of refugee qualifications, MOOCs (Massive open online course) as a form of education growing in popularity, news on the Global and Lisbon Convention and plans to expand the network. The meeting also included presentations of higher education systems of Iran, Turkey, Russia, Argentina and United States.