Abstract :
[en] Evaluation is nowadays a general trend in the European Universities. At the University of Liège, the evaluation process is threefold: fist there is the evaluation of the bachelor and master degrees, then the second evaluation concerns the internal administrations and finally Research activities are being evaluated. This quality policy at the different levels of the Institution is organized by the Vice-Rector for Quality, Pr. Freddy Coignoul and the SMAQ service (Service de Management et d’Accompagnement à la Qualité), which aims to promote, coordinate and disseminate within the University of Liège a culture of the Quality, founded on the values of the Institution. The Research assessment is a procedure undertaken by the University in order to promote the quality of the research in the Departments or research centres.
Within the Faculty of Applied Sciences, the evaluation of the Bachelor and Master degrees in Engineering was carried out in 2013 by the AEQES (Agence pour l’Evaluation de la Qualité de l’Enseignement) and CTI (Commission des Titres d’Ingénieur - France). The present report is dedicated to the evaluation of research led in the Education and Research Department (DER) ArGEnCo.
The present evaluation report proposes a global presentation of all our research activities. At the Department level, one of the elected members of the Executive Bureau is in charge of the Research, covering both evaluation and quality policy. In October 2013, the Executive bureau appointed a research steering committee, whose fist task was to coordinate the present evaluation report, following the guidelines of the SMAQ service.
The draft of such a document arises from the work of the steering committee but also from the contributions of all Department members, who were asked to contribute to the report or to complete databases. The progress of this evaluation report was presented by the Steering committee to the Department Council and during the General Assembly of the Department. Moreover, two Focus groups were organized by the SMAQ service, in order to get the feedback of technician and administrative members on one hand and scientific members on the other hand, on the general organization of the research in the ArGEnCo Department. The reports of these two Focus groups (Appendix 4 in French) underpinned our thinking about our research management.
This report is therefore the fist evaluation of the research led in the Department, the present effort should be pursued, and deepened, within the coming years. Some of the databases necessary for the evaluation have been developed in the frame of this procedure. This has resulted in a huge amount of work for every Department members to collect all the data. New procedures in the management of the Department will help establishing the next research evaluation reports systematically, in particular for the collection of the complete dataset.
Following the guidelines of the SMAQ service, this evaluation report is divided into two main parts: the fist one focuses on a self-evaluation report of the research activities and the second part presents the Action Plan of the Department for the next five years to come.
The self-evaluation report is composed of four Sections: Section one presents the Research organization and topics of the Department, Section two focuses on the Research activities, Section three gives an overview of the mobility (in and out), the attractiveness and the scientific recognition of the Department and finally Section four is dedicated to the resources available in ArGEnCo Department. Each Section ends up with a SWOT analysis.
The Action Plan proposed by the Steering Committee results from the analysis of the self-evaluation report, insofar as it synthesizes and prioritizes the actions of the Department for the next fie years. These priorities are formulated as proposals following a contractual approach between research entities and Institution authorities, to whom the report will be presented.
