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The four strands
Get involved | Meetings and documents
Interviews with participating countries
FAQs | Guide for sponsors | AHELO newsletter
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We inform you that a Call for Tenders for the AHELO Feasibility Study has been published.
More information by clicking here.
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Brochure on AHELO
What is AHELO?
The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) is a ground-breaking initiative to assess learning outcomes on an international scale by creating measures that would be valid for all cultures and languages. Between ten and thirty-thousand higher education students in over ten different countries will take part in a feasibility study to determine the bounds of this ambitious project, with an eye to the possible creation of a full-scale AHELO upon its completion.
AHELO was born out of discussions at the 2006 OECD Ministerial Conference in Athens, and is managed under the aegis of the members of the OECD Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE).
The 21st Century is witnessing the rapid transformation of higher education. More students than ever before enter higher education and a growing number study abroad. The job market demands new skills and adaptability, and HEIs (“Higher Education Institutions”, which include universities, polytechnic schools and colleges) struggle to hold their own in a fiercely competitive marketplace. Ministers at the Athens Conference agreed that OECD countries needed to take a further step by making higher education not only more available but of better quality, and that current assessment methods were not fully adequate to meet these changes. An alternative had to be found. AHELO is the result.
Following the Ministerial Conference three experts meetings were held to lay the groundwork for the feasibility study and set out a roadmap for its completion.
What AHELO is not
AHELO is not a university ranking like the Shanghai Jiao Tong, the Times Higher Education or any number of others. The designers of AHELO reject the idea that higher education can be reduced to a handful of criteria which leaves out more than it includes. Instead, AHELO sets out to identify and measure as many factors as possible influencing higher education, with the emphasis being always on teaching and learning.
What is at stake?
University presidents and Chinese mothers
University rankings - or league tables - are the usual means by which students and parents choose a university. Rumor has it that university Presidents and Chinese mothers are their most fervent readers. Undoubtedly, parents want the best education possible for their children, and university leaders worry about their position on the rankings ladder. But rankings may do more harm than good because they exclude the essential: what goes on in the classroom. Rankings tend to give research, award-winning faculty, and older, pre-1920’s universities priority over teaching and learning.
17 000 Alma Maters
If you enroll in an advanced research programme in Belgium, Canada, the UK or the US, chances are one-in-five that you are a foreign student. Even at the undergraduate level, foreign students may account for over 15% of the student body. In 2006, 2.9 million students in higher education were enrolled at institutions outside their country, a jump of 3% from the previous year.
The increasing mobility of students, along with nearly 17 000 HEIs worldwide from which to choose, means that assuring quality education is crucial if HEIs and governments hope to remain at the forefront of scientific and social advances.
One size does not fit all
A Nobel Prize-winning professor may be an asset to a research programme, and certainly buffs up a university’s image, but it reveals nothing about teaching or learning. On the other hand, the percentage of high-profile faculty is easy to measure, as is the number of publications and citations in Nature or the British Medical Journal - one reason why university rankings use them.
But an overreliance on these indicators is simplistic and therefore dangerous. Dangerous not because of what they include – a strong research programme is what a doctoral student in molecular biology is seeking – but because of what they exclude. Science and medicine, for example, are fields of international scope which can be assessed more or less independently of culture, geography or language, and thus easier to compare. The opposite is the case for the student of 11th century Japanese literature or political science; the arts and the humanities are less amenable to this kind of approach.
Current ranking systems threaten the diversity of higher education. Universities are under pressure to cut programmes and redefine missions in a fight for survival that depends on clambering into the top 10, 50 or 100 universities. They may throw their best assets overboard in the rash attempt to keep their university afloat. Such pressure breeds an unhealthy copycat behavior among HEIs, the result of which can only be a bland standardization.
A better measure of educational success
In order to fulfill its mission, an HEI must recognise its strengths and weaknesses. Because AHELO employs a wider range of measures, it provides faculties, students and government agencies with a more balanced assessment without requiring HEIs to sacrifice their missions or autonomy in their subsequent efforts to improve performance.
Further information
The four strands
The factors affecting higher education are woven so tightly together that they must first be teased apart before an accurate assessment can be made. The AHELO feasibility study thus explores four complementary strands. More...
Get involved
For more information on how you or your institution can get involved in AHELO or receive updates on the project please visit the Get involved page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions on AHELO? Please see the FAQs.
Meetings and documents
Reports from past meetings and details of upcoming meetings around AHELO are available on this page.
Interviews with participating countries
Representatives from some of the countries participating in the feasibility study answered questions about this experience. The answers of three of these countries are available.
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