David Avery speaks about Quality Assurance at FutureLearn at the UNESCO-AAQ conference  

David Avery, Senior Partnership Manager at FutureLearn, will talk at the UNESCO-AAQ conference on Friday 16 February on FutureLearn’s quality assurance processes. He’ll talk about why FutureLearn conducts their own QA on partner courses, how they go about it, and the positive impact it has for both learners and partners.

The UNESCO Regional Consultation Meeting for Western Europe will take place in the International Conference Centre Geneva (CICG) on 15-16 February 2018 under the title “The role of Quality Assurance in Higher Education: challenges, developments and trends”.

This is a regional event, co-organised by UNESCO’s Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning systems and the Swiss Agency of Accreditation and Quality Assurance (AAQ) with the support of the Swiss National Commission for UNESCO, held in preparation for the UNESCO global conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education, which takes place in Paris on 21-23 November 2018.  

The conference will discuss:

• Quality assurance and the diversification of provision in higher education;
• Quality assurance and higher education in a global context (socio-economic development and Lifelong learning);
• Quality assurance in higher education for sustainable development;
• How to ensure the relevance of external quality assurance mechanisms: accountability vs. improvement?;
• The role of internal quality assurance;
• Quality assurance of internationalisation;
• Internationalisation of quality assurance and the mutual recognition of quality assurance outcomes.

David Avery is a Senior Partnership Manager at FutureLearn, responsible for helping partners deliver valuable courses to learners around the world. A core part of his role is to quality assure courses according to pedagogical, technical, business and accessibility criteria. Prior to joining FutureLearn, David spent 7 years developing digital learning content and platforms for the British Library – opening up the archives to learners, teachers and the wider public. He has also worked in IT and e-learning for a Further Education college for a number of years. David has a Masters Degree in History from Royal Holloway, University of London.