Governance Structure

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The governance of Open ECBCheck relies on four distinct bodies or groups that are the Open ECBCheck International Advisory Board, the Open ECBCheck Administrative Office, the Open ECBCheck Awarding Body and a group of Peer-Reviewers which are described in the following section in more detail:

  1. The Open ECBCheck International Advisory Board consists of a number of organisations that are either committed organisations from the field of Capacity Building or expert organisations in the fields of e-Learning and Quality (e.g. research centres, universities). Each organisation may have one representative in the Advisory Board that needs to appoint a deputy if he or she is unable to attend a meeting or not able to carry out a duty. The “Open ECBCheck International Advisory Board” is responsible for the strategic development of Open ECBCheck to continuously adapt the label to the communities needs. The board also drives the development of the quality criteria for both institutions and programmes/courses as well as the criteria for institutions based on current insights from research. Finally, the Advisory Board is also a potential pool for peer-reviewers with expert knowledge.
  2. The Open ECBCheck Administrative Office is responsible for the smooth operation of the Open ECBCheck community label. This responsibility includes being the first access point for all parties involved into the label, especially the fist contact to and information for organisations that are interested in joining the initiative or obtaining the Open ECBCheck label. The Administrative Office is also responsible for all coordination processes for the Open ECBCheck label, e.g. follow up on running accreditation processes or organisation of meetings etc. Furthermore, the Open ECBCheck Administrative Office is responsible for the administration of the OpenECBCheck web pages as well as all collaborative tools used by members and bodies of the community. Administration of the webpage includes another important task, the Administration Office is as well responsible to update the official list of programmes/courses as well as organisations that have successfully obtained the label published on the web pages of Open ECBCheck. This list is the only reliable source for external parties to be sure a member organisation has obtained the label. Another important responsibility of the “Open ECBCheck Administration Office” is to keep an overview of the available peer-reviewers, this includes keeping track of their OpenECBCheck peer-review experience, providing information on the peer-reviewers to organisations that start the peer-review and all necessary coordination processes for the peer-review.
  3. The Open ECBCheck Awarding Body takes the final decision whether a label is awarded for a programme/course or institution. This group consists of a mix of experts from the fields of e-Learning and Quality as well as of members of the Capacity Building community. The members are elected by the Advisory Board and cannot be members of the Advisory Board at the same time. The Awarding Body receives a peer-review report on the self-assessment from the peer-reviewers together with a recommendation whether the label should be awarded or not. Based on this information, the Awarding Body decides with a majority decision about awarding the label. The division between the bodies responsible for the decision and review of the self-assessment is important to guarantee independence of the awarding decision, to improve reliability and to support credibility of the label itself. This separation of responsibilities also requires that none of the appointed peer-reviewers is a member of the Awarding Body.
  4. The Peer-reviewers are of crucial importance for the process of awarding the Open ECBCheck label and for providing the reviewed organisation with a learning opportunity. They are responsible for the peer-reviews of institutional or programme related self-assessments and write a self-assessment review report for the Awarding Body as well as the learning report for the institution. The analysis has shown that it is crucial that peer-reviewers are members of the community of Capacity Building Organisations, however they cannot be members of the Awarding Body of Open ECBCheck.