Accreditation of professional programs is an essential element in the management of professional faculties. Accreditation ensures consistent educational qualifications and minimum standards between schools and facilitates the continuous improvement of the quality of professional programs. Ongoing accreditation confirms that learners are accessing the highest standard of education. The process of preparing for an accreditation review can be complex, time consuming, and costly. Failure to maintain accreditation poses serious consequences to a faculty. The loss of credibility within the professional community may be substantial and the costs incurred to regain accreditation and reputation could be considerable.
Recognizing the significant time and expense involved in managing the accreditation process, achieving accreditation, and sustaining programs of the highest quality between accreditation cycles, Castle Rock Research Corporation and the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta, with the support of the Alberta Department of Advanced Education and Technology, collaborated to develop an accreditation management software solution. The Accreditation Management System (AMS) has been designed specifically to support the processes, content, and workflow required to meet and continuously monitor compliance with Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) accreditation standards.
AMS addresses the management of CEAB accreditation requirements in a series of three steps:
- Existing programs of study, and the underlying required and elective courses, are added to the AMS database, this data may be transferred from the existing institutional information system or directly entered into AMS. When the data entry phase is complete, users will be able to visualize the content of the programs and courses as they align to CEAB accreditation requirements.
- Accreditation evidence for each course and program is transferred into AMS and is stored in the content repository intrinsic to the system. Evidence includes course materials, examinations, instructor qualifications, samples of completed assignments, student transcripts, and other relevant materials. The system supports the upload and archiving of documents in multiple electronic formats.
- A series of reports are generated, presenting the accreditation criteria in a format that is consistent with CEAB expectations. The reports include the assembled evidence for each course and program, and can be output in print or electronic form.
AMS facilitates the automation of the completion of the CEAB questionnaire in keeping with the CEAB format for each program under review. All mandated calculations, tables and supporting course and instructor criteria are automatically generated by the system and organized into a printable pdf document specific to the preferred CEAB structure.
Program State at a Glance
Summaries show the current state of each program, colour-coded to highlight standing against the CEAB targets.
Graphical Checklists
Checklists show where materials have been gathered and uploaded to support course data. Checklists also highlight instances where material is required.
User Roles
Instructors, departments, faculty administrators, and custom roles are used to grant different users access to various areas of the application.
Data
Accreditation requires a significant amount of data to be assessed, compiled, and reported. Most of that data preexists in digital form, and AMS provides a way to simplify importing that data into the system, avoiding many hours of manual entry.
Graduate Attributes Curriculum Matrix
Development of the performance indicators and a strategy to gather measurements can be facilitated by a curriculum map that shows the degree of importance each course in the program has to the development of each attribute.