Assessment and improvement of the resources quality management system of the teaching laboratories of the Faculty of Chemistry

Abstract

Following the Bologna Process, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) was created, which is a set of international agreements in which 48 countries participate. Their purpose is to develop a sequence of standards and guidelines in order to ensure the concurrence and quality of the different university studies that take place in the countries that are part of this educational and quality framework. Although proposed in 1999, its total implantation didn’t end until 2010. Because of the establishment of the EHEA, all the university institutions involved such as the University of Barcelona (UB, Universitat de Barcelona), have been forced to modify and unify their systems of higher education and quality management. This way, the Internal Quality Assurance System (SAIQU, Sistema d’Assegurament Intern de la Qualitat) was created. The SAIQU is a common system at the Faculty of Chemistry that governs for the evaluation and the continuous improvement of teaching quality. The SAIQU was imposed to the Quality Management System in the Teaching Laboratories (SGQLD, Sistema de Gestió de la Qualitat en els Laboratoris Docents), which is the system that the Faculty of Chemistry implanted in 1996 to carry out the laboratory practices of the official degrees and master's degrees with the maximum teaching efficiency. With this work, the process of revision of the system of quality management of material resources in the Faculty's laboratories will begin, making first an assessment of the current situation of the laboratories to evaluate the current state of the laboratories, detecting this way the deficiencies and needs. Once the assessment is made, a set of improvement proposals will be presented to deal with the disconformities detected and it will begin to work on some of the proposals