Congratulations to Galina Motova who became Vice-President of the Asia-Pacific Quality Network, APQN

The network of accreditation agencies of the Asia-Pacific Region is one of the largest in the world. It is not surprising as almost the half of human population lives there. For this reason the 15th conference held in Colombo (Sri Lanka) aroused great interest of the regional academic community.

The main topic of the conference "Quality Assurance in the Asia-Pacific Region: Insight into the Future" included three areas for discussion:

- cultural diversity and its implications for the quality of cross border higher education;

- quality assurance and objectives of sustainable development;

- quality standards for world-class education.

In the recent decade the Asia-Pacific Region has been characterized by intensive development of higher education. The countries actively learn from the practices of the traditional educational systems (USA, Great Britain, Russia), build their capacity and suggest new approaches to evaluation of education quality.

At the end of the conference the General Assembly of the network members was held. The new (sixth) Board of Directors was elected for the term of three years (2019-2022). Representatives of China, India, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vanuatu, Russia and Kazakhstan became members of the new Board. President Jianxin Zhang (People’s Republic of China) was reelected to a second term and Galina Motova (Russian Federation) became Vice-President. It is for the first time that the representative of the Russian Federation has been elected to such a senior position in the international organization of higher education.

Asia is rapidly becoming one of the important partners of the Russian Federation in the sphere of higher education.