How key accreditation issues can impact quality assurance and recognition of colleges and universities
Accreditation to courses and programs in colleges and universities has fulfilled the academic standards to produce graduates ready to enter the critical fields of science, computing, engineering, technology, and Medicine.
Academic accreditation is the trusted standard
Graduates from academic programs validated by national or regional accredited agencies such as ABET, TEQSA, NBA, and NAAC have a solid educational foundation and are capable of leading the way in innovation, creativity, and emerging technologies. Accredited programs help institutions to generate funds and support the student intake process. Millions of graduates receive degrees from accredited programs each year.
The accreditation process is an intensive team effort
The manual accreditation system is heavily dependent on individuals with the involvement of a huge workforce to review academic programs and ensure they provide the technical and professional skills necessary for graduates to succeed.
Direct involvement of faculty and staff in the self-assessment process
The self-assessment process puts pressure on the faculty members to get all the necessary reports needed to send to the evaluators and ensure compliance to standards. These reports are to be submitted in order to get the certification belonging to various categories and will require data mining from various sources. Hundreds of reports have to be submitted for accreditation.
Problems in delivering quality education and best educational experience
It is not always easy for a college or a university with thousands of enrolled students to provide the necessary data in a painstaking way. Many faculty members have to spend long hours in gathering the data for this purpose including a huge amount of historical data. Moreover, reports have to be generated based on the voluminous data collected. The overall accreditation process is very time-consuming and that’s why many universities are struggling to get accreditation for programs and institutions.
Faculty challenges to promote best practices in evaluating programs
Faculty members have to spend 30-40 percent of their time updating the documents of accreditation in a semester. Gathering data for the manual evaluation process is complex, error-prone and consumes a lot of time to calculate the evaluation mark. Process flaws if any, cannot be identified and rectified.
Mature accreditation software
One of the key differentiators of higher education institutions is its ability to integrate technology into the accreditation process and take a huge leap forward toward continuous improvement.
Accreditation management software is specifically designed keeping the various accreditations and their requirements in mind. It is designed to help colleges and universities all over the world to get accreditations from NBA, ABET, TEQSA, CPE, KHDA and more. An online accreditation system ensures that all the relevant data needed for the multiple reports are readily available in the system at the click of a button. This greatly reduces the number of hours spent by faculty in collecting all the base data. Built-in Analytics and reporting tools enable administrators to generate various types of reports which can be customized to the specific needs of the institution. The entire data is captured including the result of the various types of assessments so that it is easier to map the course and program outcomes to the eventual results obtained by the students.
