Fostering Sustainable Quality Assurance Practices in Outcome-Based Education: Lessons Learned from ABET Accreditation Process of Computing Programs

Abstract

Education is an important enabler for economic uplift of a society and academic institutions need to deliver quality education to equip students with required skills to excel in their professional careers. Due to international initiatives such as Washington and Seoul accords, outcome-based education has gained significant interest from industry, academia, governments, accreditation bodies and students. Outcome-based education is a paradigm shift form conventional education approach and its successful adoption requires sustainable quality practices by higher education institutions. Fostering quality assurance processes for outcome-based education requires careful planning and active collaboration among stakeholders. However, due to the sparse body of knowledge about quality processes in outcome-based education, many academic institutions rely on ad hoc practices, resulting in a trial and error approach. In this paper, we present set of guidelines which can help academic institutions to deploy sustainable practices in their academic programs. We document important guidelines to deliver outcome-based education based on our longitudinal work of ABET accreditation process of three different computing programs (Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, and Cyber Security and Digital Forensics). The successful application of proposed guidelines helps to foster sustainable quality practices in academic programs.

Outcomes-Based Assessment and Lessons Learned in ABET-CAC Accreditation: A Case Study of the American University in the Emirates

“…Roger highlights that there should be a reason to collect certain data that address the assessed outcome at hand; that is, without a clearly defined outcome to measure, there is not enough data to collect! Almuhaideb and Saeed [6] stated that most continuous process improvement collects a huge amount of data, but they fail to draw suitable actions for continuous improvement's action plan. Herewith, we report our continuous process improvement at CCIT.…”

“…erefore, the curriculum, instructional efforts, and assessments should be observable and measurable [4,5]. e process of improving the outcomes based on the achievement is called continuous improvement process, which is the core of OBE [6]. ABET Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) [7,8] accredits Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, and Information Technology programs.…”

Sustainable Program Assessment Practices: A Review of the ABET and NCAAA Computer Information Systems Accreditation Process

“…Establishing an institutional quality management system can help in fostering quality culture and ultimately help academic programs in achieving accreditation requirements. Almuhaideb and Saeed have proposed a set of best practices to deploy quality assurance practices to foster appropriate outcome-based learning [ 17 ]. Furthermore, Almuhaideb and Saeed have also proposed a set of organizational processes to approach ABET accreditation based on their experience of ABET accreditation of Bachelor of Cybersecurity and digital forensics program [ 18 ].…”

“…Only the last two years of the course were considered to collect program assessment data because in the first three years it is not possible to track students only belonging to a particular degree program, as students select the degree at the completion of year three only. In an earlier contribution, we have discussed the processes to have an end of term presentation where each instructor presents the result of CLO attainments and continuous improvement actions are planned based on the feedback of the entire department [ 17 ].…”

Different Ways of Teaching Digital Communication

“…Mahmood [7] highlighted the weaknesses of the traditional methods of teaching and outlines an Objects-First approach for teaching a first course in software engineering. Almuhaideb [8] presented detailed guidelines to foster an effective outcome-based program framework based on the ABET accreditation experience of three different academic programs. Gull [9] analysed the relationship between the course of human computer interaction and other courses including psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, information science, computer science and design science.…”