A Computational Framework For Academic Accreditation And Assessment In Higher Education (A3-HE) - Part 1 Academic Processes

摘要

Academic accreditation is, before anything else, an acknowledgement by the community that a given academic institution, program or service meets a prescribed set of expected quality standards issued from common good practice, and codified over the years. As a result, the by-products of such an entity, like its students, its research production, and its service involvement are de facto trusted and authoritatively accepted by the community and considered as a reference. As a lead member in the implementation of a program accreditation in computer science, an ongoing process for the past three years, we have heavily relied on stressful, tedious, slow, lengthy and sometimes unreliable paper work. Hence this paper which represents an early attempt to identify the main computational technologies and methods capable of making the accreditation processes easier, more flexible and more objective - for the best of all parties. For so doing, we first begin here, in Part 1, by discussing the main academic processes implemented by prominent accrediting bodies worldwide. The highlighted ideas pave the way to the description of the main computational technologies susceptible to enhance the academic processes, as described in Part 2 of the paper.