Accreditation is a complex concept and wide-ranging as a practice, without one single denotation. In fact, national adaptations and practices vary considerably. Exactly for this reason, the workshop proved to be a successful activity.
Institutional accreditation effectively provides a licence to operate. It is usually based on an evaluation of whether the institution meets specified minimum (input) standards. It might also be based on an estimation of the potential for the institution to produce graduates that meet explicit or implicit academic standard or professional competence. In different national contexts this has a direct bearing on initiating and granting accreditation to study programmes and courses within these study programmes according to adopted sets of criteria.
The guidelines were compiled after an in-depth study of the specific contexts and practices in China and India and on the level of the HEIs participating in the consortium too. They concern both the general rules applicable to the accreditation of the courses developed under the project and the specific institutional requirements. The guidelines also contain generic advice pertinent to the Bologna Process and the EHEA and can be further exploited by the partner universities in their future endeavours to enrich and update their curricula or introduce entirely new ones.