Accreditation process for engineering programs in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

Quality of engineering education is a core principle that can never be sacrificed. To ensure quality, engineering programs/schools seek national and/or international accreditation from relevant accreditation agencies. As higher education in Saudi Arabia is evolving rapidly and to ensure high education quality standards, the Ministry of Higher Education is requesting all the institutions of higher education to be accredited by the National Commission for Academic Accreditation & Assessment (NCAAA). The accreditation process is not very much liked by most of the faculty members as they have the misconception that it is an exhausting time consuming, not to say complex and unnecessary, process.Most faculty members are not enthusiastic about going through the preparation process and its requirements from data collection, documents and forms preparation, data aggregation, data analysis, collecting evidences, and developing corrective action and future plans as needed. This paper describes requirements for programs accreditation, the preparation process, and the challenges faced during the accreditation process. Few papers were published discussing different issues related to the accreditation process in Saudi Universities. Despite the importance of the accreditation related issues discussed in those papers, the authors believe that the challenges associated with the accreditation process and their causes are not fully reported and are very important to be presented. Programs, colleges, and faculty members need to realize those challenges to try to avoid them and make the accreditation process easier and smoother. Knowledge and information gained via observation, unstructured interviews with faculty members, discussions with colleagues from different Saudi universities, and extensive involvement of the authors in the accreditation process in a private university and a public university is utilized to state challenges and barriers experienced throughout different stages of the accreditation journey. The private university was preparing for NCAAA and the public university was preparing for ABET. Although the study is based more on the national accreditation experience, it was found that similar challenges were faced and same recommendations apply for both national and international accreditation. This means that type of accreditation and differences between programs/universities was not the problem and proves that the readiness of the program and the institution is the most important catalyst of the accreditation process. The main challenges faced by different programs were added workload, understaffing, inadequate training, inability to properly prepare required forms and documents, lack of faculty commitment to the accreditation process, high faculty turn over, and lack of proper support from higher administration. The paper discusses the main causes of the problems faced during the process and presents some recommendations that might help making the accreditation process easier and smoother. The study concludes with th...

Intelligent Accreditation System: A Survey of the Issues, Challenges, and Solution

“…They notice that the differences between the programs and institutes accreditation are not the problem; the readiness of the program and the institution itself is proving to be the catalyst for the accreditation process. This primary outcome by Abou-Zeid et al, [8] is further discussed in this paper to highlight the risk of the added workload on staff members that may lower the priority of teaching and research for filling the accreditation forms and conducting the surveys required. There are similarities in Abou-Zeid et al, findings and the work presented in this paper, especially the lack of belief in the outcome of the accreditation of the institution, which may hinder the accreditation process immensely.…”

“…Abou-Zeid and Taha [8] address the requirements of different international accreditation agencies such as the Saudi National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment (NCAAA) and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). They discuss the challenges that arise during the preparation of the accreditation documents, including the inadequacy of knowledge of the accreditation needs and requirements.…”

Concurrent application for ABET and NCAAA accreditation

“…As mentioned before, with the overloaded work hours, the faculties seem reluctant and find no motivation to this extra work. For detail on other challenges, please see [13].…”

Conceptual Framework for Developing an ERP Module for Quality Management and Academic Accreditation at Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Saudi Arabia

“…The accreditation is not easy process from the perspective of most faculty members as they have the misconception that it is an exhausting time consuming, not to say complex and unnecessary process [7], and there are some challenges, such as how Little research has been conducted on ERP implementations in universities compared to other environments [1] [5]. Previous research has addressed the characteristics and components of ERP systems that are appropriate to the environment of educational organizations, especially universities, such as the use of ERP systems in the process of learning, teaching and classroom organization [8].…”

“…ERP systems vendors for HEIs such as Oracle, SAP, People Soft and Jenzabar did not implement a module to cover quality assurance requirements or academic accreditation [9], so these systems need to contain a special module to meet the www.ijacsa.thesai.org requirements of quality and academic accreditation, including plans, reports, performance indicators and a survey of academic and non-academic services at the university, the difficulty in collecting such data hinders quality processes and delays academic accreditation and negatively affects the performance of the quality team and faculty to meet those requirements [6] [7]. The existence of a ERP module for quality requirements and academic accreditation greatly facilitates the collection of this data from various sources within the university and helps to provide the necessary reports and statistics for workers on this type of projects, where the module organizes the necessary processes for quality and accreditation by providing a special database and through linking with the other subsystems at the university.…”