Abstract:

The quality of higher education is one of the most important issues in the development of a national higher education system. In our recent work we have been concerned with the research which has been conducted into why and when English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is being introduced and how it is delivered, or regarding the consequences of introducing EMI on teaching, learning, assessing and teacher professional development. EMI is expanding in Romanian higher education, backed up by both integrative and instrumental reasons. The process of accreditation, as an endeavor to ensure and certify quality in Romanian universities, is carried out according to a quality assurance system by an organization named ARACIS - The Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. It performs a special assessment for the study programs in foreign languages. It observes different aspects of the supplier's institutional capacity to organize these programs in terms of specific admission criteria (the language certificate is a mandatory requirement), language skills of the teaching staff, availability of the learning resources in the foreign language, learning and living standards of the campus and so on. This paper aims to analyze the particular case in which a particular study program in civil engineering is being accredited and assessed at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The Faculty of Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania trains diploma engineers using EMI and it is monitored for periodic accreditation and evaluation. This facilitates identifying which problems to address in priority and which measures to adopt incrementally. The activities and outcomes have an important impact on the quality of the university graduates and on the work of universities as a whole, making the quality of higher education a priority area for both higher education institutions and the policy makers.

Keywords:

Higher education, quality assurance, EMI, civil engineering, accreditation.