Programme governance & quality assurance
Above: Board of Studies's former Chair Henrik Bødker gives his inaugural speech at our first Mundus Journalism reunion in Amsterdam
The EU's Erasmus Mundus scheme selects and supports top-quality Masters Courses - among these, Mundus Journalism
Erasmus Mundus is an European Community Action programme which seeks to enhance the quality of European higher education world-wide, and to promote intercultural understanding between Europe and non-EU countries.
The Erasmus Mundus programme supports top-quality Masters Courses offered by European university consortiums, and provides EU-funded scholarships. To become an Erasmus Mundus programme, the Mundus Journalism Consortium and the study programme has been through a very competitive and elaborate selection process in the European Commission.
The Evaluation Committee is assisted by a Selection Board composed of leading personalities and academic experts from European academia proposed by the Member States and appointed by the Education, Culture and Audiovisual Executive Agency within the European Commission.
The Mundus Journalism programme received its first Erasmus Mundus label from the European Commission back in 2005.
The governance structures of the Mundus Journalism Consortium
Within the Mundus consortium, all universities work closely together to ensure a very high quality at all levels. The consortium includes the Board of Studies (BoS) and appoints the Head of Board. The BoS convenes biannually in Aarhus each February, and at one of the specialisation universities, in rotation, each September. It is the responsibility of the Head of Board to call for and preside over board meetings.
The Board of Studies delegates responsibilities for monitoring the programme, administrative procedures and the strategies to ensure economic sustainability to three joint committees. All degree-awarding partners contribute to the work within these committees.
The Board of Studies also delegates tasks to three joint panels that are responsible for programme enrichment within the areas of teaching, research and media industry. The speed with which the challenges and opportunities facing journalism have developed during the past decade is tangible proof of the necessity to continuously develop and enrich the programme, and the working groups will attend to this task by reaching out to associated partners and alumni.
The figure below shows the governing structures of our consortium:
Day-to-day quality assurance
The responsibility for ensuring the day-to-day educational quality of the Erasmus Mundus Programme lies with a number of management bodies related to the Consortium, including the Board of Studies, Programme Management, Examination Board, Advisory Board and the Student representatives.
In addition, there is a Programme Coherence Committee actively reassuring the coherence of the programme as a whole.
A Programme Quality Auditor oversees quality assessment of the overall course scheme, and the programme is accredited regularly by institutional and national accreditation agencies.
Finally, an advisory board of media professionals provides another source of external review to provide insights and views from the profession.
The Board of Studies
The Board of Studies (BoS) is responsible for ensuring that the programme meets the highest academic standards and national as well as European laws.
It is the forum for quality assurance of the consortium and its activities and the BoS meets twice a year. The full responsibility of the Board is recorded in the Memorandum of Agreement.
The Board of Studies is comprised of two senior members from each EU university and one member from each of the non-EU universities. The head of the Board of Studies is Sandra Lábová:
Sandra Lábová, Ph.D.
Lecturer / Erasmus Mundus Journalism Coordinator
E-mail: sandra.labova@fsv.cuni.cz
Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University
The Programme Management
The Programme Management consists of the educational directors, who are responsible for the on-going management, the maintenance of programme quality and for ensuring a high standard student performance.
The Joint Examination Board
The joint Examination Board ensures the quality of examinations; establishes guidelines for marking and awarding results in exams, grant exceptions and impose sanctions in the event of academic misconduct.
The Advisory Board
The Advisory Board of media professionals meets with the Board of Studies to provide insights and views from the profession in the development of the curriculum in relation to the employability of the graduates.
The Student Representatives
Student representatives are current students who advise the programme management on students’ interests and concerns. They are also members of the Educational Committee.
The Higher Education Accreditations
Accreditations of the Mundus Journalism programme are taking place at both university, national and EU-level.
