April 2021 marked the first anniversary of the DEQAR CONNECT project.

The DEQAR CONNECT project is coordinated by the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR) and is carried out under the Erasmus+ programme with EU co-funding. The main goal of the project is to expand coverage to EHEA countries currently under-represented in DEQAR. The project partners are 21 accreditation agencies in the EHEA. Russia is represented by the National Centre for Public Accreditation.

Following the results of the previous year, EQAR prepared an Activity Report on the project, where it represented the analysis of work of accreditation agencies and statistics on reports’ submission to the DEQAR database.

Throughout the year several training sessions and webinars were held. EQAR nominated 8 mentors who coordinated the work of partner agencies on the development of automated data loading to the DEQAR database. Overall, 35 online meetings with the representatives of the project and accreditation agencies were held. At the end of the support period 5 agencies introduced an API method to load data to the DEQAR database, 8 agencies shifted to the CSV format of data loading, and 6 agencies chose a manual method of data loading.

As on March 29, 2021 57 826 reports on 2759 higher education institutions are registered in the DEQAR database. Approximately 60% of all reports loaded to the database from March 2020 till February 2021 were from the partners of the DEQAR CONNECT project.

The number of countries represented in the DEQAR database increased significantly over this year. At the start of the project (2018) DEQAR comprised 15 European systems of higher education, and on March 2021 the number of countries increased to 21, including Austria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Lithuania and Norway. In the nearest future it is planned that 4 more countries will join the database: Armenia, Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands.

As the DEQAR CONNECT project ends on January 2022, it is planned to hold various events this year too that are aimed at, first of all, work with the agencies who are currently on the stage of developing their databases.