This summer, the Slovak Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport started a new project aiming to conduct an internationalisation audit of 10 Slovak higher education institutions.  

Planned for this autumn/winter, the audit is co-designed with the Ministry and conducted by a group of international experts, including Irina Ferencz and Veronika Kupriyanova from the ACA Secretariat, as well as national experts from two ACA member organisations: SAIA, n.o. (Karla Zimanova) and SAAIC (Pavol Galas). Based on a series of site visits and consultations with key institutional players, the experts will assess the current activities pursued by the selected universities in the field of international higher education and advise them on possible ways to further enhance such activities via a comprehensive set of recommendations. 

At the end of the exercise, the ten participating institutions will receive up to EUR 600,000 for the enhancement of their internationalisation activities, in line with experts’ recommendations and their self-proposed action plans. The funding comes from the Recovery and Resilience Fund and is to be used by the end of 2025 (for more details, see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, June 2021). 

ACA was previously involved in similar internationalisation evaluation activities in Czechia, between 2018 and 2022 (see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, December 2020 & February 2022) Hungary, between 2017 and 2020 (see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, October 2017) and Romania, between 2014 and 2015.