Finding good friends to learn from and to inspire

This innovative practice paper presents a self-evaluation model for study programs or institutions linked with a unique quality enhancement process. It focuses on enhancement at the study program level but can be used at different levels. The study program evaluates itself on 28 criteria. Based on such self-evaluation, it identifies a subset of the criteria it would like to improve. The improvement process has at its heart a cross-sparring collaborative and iterative approach, whereby paired study programs are to learn and inspire each other by being critical and constructive friends. This paper focus on the pairing - how can a good match be made so that there will be new insights and inspirations? The criteria draws upon an international super-set of criteria from engineering accreditation systems like ABET, EUR-ACE, CEAB or Engineers Australia, and is extensible. They are scored on process maturity levels as found in the most recent ISO/IEC 33020:2015 series, and complemented by contextual parameters such as the size of the study program, disciplinary main focus or geography. The authors propose a pairing algorithm to find the best match for (engineering) study programs that want to learn from and to inspire each other. Based on four pilots conducted in the fall 2015, this paper reflects on the pairing of eight accredited engineering study programs.