During the course of July and August 2020, European and Kurdishp HEI partners conducted individual peer review meetings in order to establish the progress made and setup achieved by individual partner universities from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to engage in internationalisation.

The peer reviews were conducted as part of Work Package 4 and represent a key element in the project’s quality assurance activities.

Unfortunately, conducting the peer reviews as originally planned as on-site visits was rendered impossible by the Covid-19 pandemic prohibiting both international and, in case of the Kurdistan Region/Iraq, even intra-country travel.

As part of the TIGRIS project’s mitigation strategy to answer the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, the project consortium devised a new format for this activity allowing the peer review meetings to be implemented virtually and in form of structured qualitative interviews.

As part of this, European partners developed an evaluation framework build around qualitative indicators to be assessed and later reported on. In addition, the qualitative assessment was flanked by a quantitative data collection.

Kurdish HEI partners prepared the meetings on their end and, instructed by previously issued guidance notes, collected and prepared relevant information and presentations.

By this framework, the consortium was able to implement its comprehensive review activities successfully and mitigating much of the global pandemic’s detrimental effects.