Dr. Robert Wagenaar (r.wagenaar@rug.nl) is a Professor of History and Politics of Higher Education and since 2014 Director of the International Tuning Academy at the University of Groningen. The Academy is an education and research centre with focus on the reform of HE programmes. It runs a bi-annual indexed Tuning Journal for Higher Education, since 2013.

He was Dean of Studies at the Faculty of Arts from 2004 to 2014, responsible for organisation and quality of teaching and learning of 5.500 students. Since 2006 he is president of the successful transnational interdisciplinary Erasmus Mundus Master Programme EUROCULTURE: Politics, Culture and Society in a Global Context: involving 8 EU and 4 non-European institutions enrolling appr. 80 new students every year.

Wagenaar has been directly involved in many international initiatives such as ECTS since 1989 and the Qualifications Framework for the European Higher Education Area and the European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning.

Wagenaar is co-author of the ECTS Users’ Guides, 2004, 2009 and 2015. At present, he is involved in the revision of the ECTS Users’ Guide 2015 as senior-advisor on invitation of the EC. Furthermore, he is involved in the activities of the Bologna Follow-up Group Thematic Peer Group A on Qualifications Frameworks, representing the Netherlands. From 2021-2024 he was a member of the Working Group on Monitoring the Implementation of the Bologna Process and of the Task Force on Enhancing Knowledge Sharing in the EHEA community.

He has (co-)coordinated 42 large scale international HE projects. His most recent projects are Measuring and Comparing Achievements of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education in Europe (CALOHEE) (2016-2024), and Integrating Entrepreneurship and Work Experience into Higher Education (WEXHE) (2017-2019) and its follow-up Electronic Work-based Learning (eWBL) (2022-2024), all co-financed by the EU.

His research interest is in HE innovation and policy making: https://www.rug.nl/staff/r.wagenaar/