Trends in Learning Structures in Higher Education

The report provides a comprehensive picture of the implementation of the Bologna Process across Europe, within various higher education institutions and within each country.

Executive Summary

• This study aims to capture the most important recent trends related to the Bologna reforms. This report tries to reflect the perspectives of the higher education institutions, thus giving a fairly comprehensive picture of the present phase of the Bologna Process. If the European Higher Education Area is to become a reality, it has to evolve from governmental intentions and legislation to institutional structures and processes, able to provide for the intense exchange and mutual cooperation necessary for such a cohesive area. This means that higher education institutions are heavily and directly involved in the development of viable interpretations of concepts which were and are sometimes still vague, even in the minds of those who use these concepts most often. Concrete meaning needs to be given to:

• the term “employability” in the context of study programmes at Bachelor level;
• the relation between the new two tiers;
• workload-based credits as units to be accumulated within a given programme;
• curricular design that takes into account qualification descriptors, level descriptors, skills and learning outcomes;
• the idea of flexible access and individualised learning paths for an increasingly diverse student body;
• the role of Higher Education inserting itself into a perspective of lifelong learning;
• the conditions needed to optimise access to mobility; and last but not least, to
• meaningful internal and external quality assurance procedures.

This study emphasises the need for complementarity between the top-down approach applied so far in the Bologna Process, with the emerging bottom-up process in which higher education institutions are already playing and should continue to play a key role – as expected of them by the Ministers when they first met in Bologna.

Read the

complete studyon the European University Association website.