Promoting Excellence With An Accreditation Management System
Accreditation is a formal recognition of an educational program or the institution in accordance with the standards of quality set by the accreditation agency to produce graduates ready to enter the critical fields of science, computing, engineering, technology, and medicine. Graduates from academic programs validated by national or regional accredited agencies worldwide have a solid educational foundation and are capable of leading the way in innovation, creativity, and emerging technologies. Millions of graduates have received degrees from accredited programs each year.
Accreditation agencies evaluates specific academic program of study at a variety of degree levels (associate, bachelor, and master) or for the overall institutional quality.
One of the key differentiators of an institution for change is its ability to integrate technology into the accreditation process and take a huge leap forward towards continuous improvement. A manual accreditation system is heavily dependent on individuals and puts pressure on the faculty members to evaluate continuously and ensure compliance to standards.
Problems And Difficulties Of Colleges And Universities With Traditional Accreditation
Accrediting institutions have benchmarked compliance standards and institutions and programs have to make self-evaluation study based on the standards. Accrediting institutions assess and grade institutions including the courses and programs, units, faculty, departments, etc. When the institution has fulfilled the established norms and standards prescribed by the regulatory authority, then the institutions and the degrees are accredited.
- Manual accreditation is time consuming, tedious, and frustrating.
- Faculty members have to spend 30-40% of their time to update the documents of accreditation in a semester.
- The manual accreditation process is not accurate and contains lot of errors and mistakes which are difficult to rectify.
- Time consuming to find the evaluation mark.
- Complexities in calculation of marks manually.
- Process flaws cannot be identified and rectified.
Why Automated Accreditation Matters?
In the past several years, there has been a great deal of discussion about the accreditation and assessment of programs in higher education institutions. Educators, students, parents, and others have posed questions about the value of accreditation in higher education, focusing particularly on the value added at the institutional level.
Automated accreditation is capable of leading the institution with innovation and emerging technologies for the welfare of the stakeholders. Implementing an online accreditation management system can sustain the institutional momentum for change.
Here are some reasons to consider why a technology-enabled accreditation management system can make a huge difference to the institution, students, and the society as well:
- Fulfillment of commitment to delivery of quality education.
- Providing higher education institutions with a new sense of direction, purpose, and brand identity.
- Easily identifying and filling up the gaps in curriculum to improve learning standards.
- Assessment and Accreditation tools for ABET, NBA, and NAAC processes support the outcome-based education software platform.
- Accelerated accreditation of specific programs and the overall institution.
- Faculty time and cost saving in documentation of accreditation standards.
- Mapping graduate attributes help students to enter the workforce.
- Curriculum calibrated to the current needs of society.
- Measurement of course and learning outcomes at every level with auto-mapping.
- Innovation in teaching methods and assessments with online tests, quizzes, and puzzles using the faculty information system.
- Continuous improvement in the education processes at every stage to deliver quality education.
- Students and parents can be confident about the curriculum, teaching, infrastructure, and the learning resources.
- Industry, government, and employers worldwide trust online accreditation.
Adopting An Accreditation Management System
Online accreditation can easily help the institution align with its program vision, mission, program educational outcomes (PEOs), program outcomes (POs), and course outcomes (COs) with learning outcomes (LOs). Online assessment tools to enable the system to automatically calculate course attainment. An Accreditation Management System is composed of multiple measures that can track student progress, complete achievements, and provide operational effectiveness through digital assessment activities including assignments, examinations, and quizzes from a question bank database aligned to learning outcomes.
Continuous Quality Improvements Through Accreditation
Online accreditation supports quality assurance system that relies on relevant, verifiable, representative, cumulative, and actionable measures, and provides demonstrable evidence through dashboards and reporting system which are valid, accurate, and consistent. Moreover, it provides evidence demonstrating its compliance to accreditation standards.
The most valuable benefit being the unique opportunity to build upon the institution-wide momentum for institutional effectiveness with an automated process for continuous quality improvement of programs and courses leading to enhanced institutional effectiveness.