THE VALIDATION JOURNEY BEGINS

Between 7 and 10 August 2026, the TranSustain HE consortium held a series of online meetings to launch the validation and reliability programme of the TranSustain HE Model, the project’s integrated sustainability assessment model. The programme opened on Friday 7 August with the consortium kick-off, where partners from Türkiye, Greece, North Macedonia and Slovenia reviewed the structure of the model and the roadmap for the programme, which combines an independent expert review of the model’s content with pilot studies at partner institutions and a joint publication of the results. The same day, a dedicated session was held with the Research Institute for Law and Development, Maribor (Slovenia).

On Monday 10 August, the series continued with working sessions with the University of Thessaly (Greece), International Balkan University (North Macedonia) and the Turkish partner institutions, Selçuk University, Ankara University and the KOP Regional Development Administration. The sessions walked through the validation instruments in detail: the expert opinion form, the scoring workbook and the analysis templates, together with the procedure the international expert panel will follow. Partner feedback has been built into the instruments, including clearer terminology and a new applicability rule which ensures that institutions of every type, with or without a single campus, can be assessed fairly.

As the next step, partners will nominate candidates for the international expert panel, and the ethics application will be submitted to the coordinating university’s research ethics committee.