The quality of the educational process at university department level : a community of practice view

The literature and evidence of the theory and practice of quality assessment in higher education has been growing fast. Within the larger field of quality assessment, the terms good practices and communities of practice have been largely used by administrators, managers and practitioners with various intentions and conotations. The present article explores the use of the concepts in the Romanian higher education with the view to document the process of adopting or developing an internal assessment procedure in the languages department of a non-philological university in Romania. The need for such an endeavour and the associated challenges are explained through the external pressures to increase the visibility of the department both at institutional and general public levels.