Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic

Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic is Chief of the Section for Reform, Innovation and Quality Assurance, in the Higher Education Division in UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Her special areas of expertise include UNESCO’s work on conventions, recommendations, codes of good practices and guidelines that relate to the recognition of qualifications and quality assurance in higher education. In that framework, she was responsible for the elaboration of the 1997 Lisbon Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications in the European Region and is Secretary of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Mediterranean Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications.

Her more recent responsibilities are aimed at developing policy debates on cross-border higher education covering a wide range of issues from distance education to trade in higher educational services through the Global Forum on International Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications (2002; 2004). One of the most recent outcomes of this work are the Guidelines on Quality Provision in Cross Border Higher Education, elaborated jointly with the OECD (2005) which promote mutual trust and international cooperation in quality assurance and the recognition of qualifications, especially those provided across borders, such as distance education, eLearning and other forms of provision.