Guidance in Program-Level Accreditation

The National Commission for Assessment, Assurance and Accreditation (NCAAA) is the Quality Assessment arm of the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE). In this paper we describe a locally-developed Webbased Outcome-Directed "Program-Level" accreditation system that complies and provides guidance with the NCAAA program accreditation requirements. It has dual purpose: first to automate the process of preparing all relevant accreditation documents, measurements, benchmarks, surveys, tests, statistics, forms, etc. And establish meaningful hyperlinks and structure among all relevant material. It also provides tools for performing important assessments functions such as PLO/CLO mapping, Rubrics direct assessment, surveys indirect assessment, trend analysis, etc. By running this E-Accreditation system one can have access to “electronic” showroom that contains all needed forms and evidence materials. This automated system helps to "stream line" the whole accreditation process. It prevents current document and data inflation. It also slims down the process and provides an agile management system. The second and novel purpose of the proposed system is to work in "reverse" for guidance and advice such as to equip students with learning outcomes instead of just measuring their degree of compliance. In fact the accreditation system is a sort of a "Live" repository that follows the continuous improvement slogan. In the sense that every semester new added documents, measurements, benchmarks, surveys, tests, statistics, forms, trend analysis, etc. are tallied to the system. At PSU this compliance, tracking and guidance system has been lunched as a full-fledged spin-off product. It is intended to be used by both internal and external programs within KSA. Both the Information Systems and Computer Science programs at Prince Sultan University (have recently been fully accredited for 7 years by the NCAAA) have used an earlier release of the proposed system. Demonstrating NCAAA compliance and guidance system is exemplified by the case of the "Information Systems" department at Prince Sultan University as a case study. In this context we describe how "Learning Outcomes" are measured and injected (guided) at both the program and course levels. We dig deep to the course level and describe measurements, assessments, and guidance tools at th eir levels. We finally show how the system is used to track and strengthen weak areas and direct users' focus to these areas. In many cases the system recommends remedies for improvement. Keywords-Compliance, Guidance, Assessment, Measurements, Accreditation