In the current scenario, accreditation from national and international societies has become important in education sectors. The accreditation reception is based on quality assurance (QA) at three levels of knowledge, competence, and skills in learning and teaching. Assessment of learning outcomes (LO) can measure the effectiveness of QA in higher educational systems. To measure the LOs, all course learning outcomes are measured to show the successful attainment of LO for QA in higher educational systems. The objective of this research is to study the importance of LOs in achieving QA in higher educational systems. The standards of accreditation are applied from two societies ABET and NCAAA. LOs are measured by the key performance indicators (KPIs) for all courses in the computer science program in public university in Middle East. The results are based on calculation of KPIs for LOs and recommendation made for each LOs at the course level.
TopIntroduction
Quality Assurance (QA) is a broad process for preventing quality failures and assure safe measures. A Quality Assurance Specialist is a professional who is responsible for monitoring, inspecting and proposing measures to correct or improve an organization's final products in order to meet established quality standards (Naim et al. 2021).
QA plays an important role in assessment and evaluation Practices in higher educational systems (Wong and Chan 2022). QA includes establishing sound assessment and evaluation practices in teacher education programs.
This involves ensuring that assessments effectively measure students' knowledge, skills, and competencies related to teaching. Accreditation is a formal decision by a recognized authority which has verified whether the institution and/or the program meets the predefined minimum quality standards.
Learning outcomes (LOs) are described as written statements of what a learner is expected to know, understand and/or be able to do at the end of a period of learning (Naim et al. 2022). The importance of LOs will increase for several reasons (Wong and Chan 2022).
Firstly, LOs make qualifications more transparent for students. Then, the range of graduates is becoming wider and acknowledgements to LOs, employers may have a better understanding of the acquired knowledge, skills and competences in order to recruit the most suitable candidate. LOs benefit for QA as they increase transparency and comparability between qualification standards.
LOs are also valuable in terms of course design.
In general, there are 8 LOs and each LO defines a specific attribute for the course (see Table 1).
Table 1. Attributes of learning outcomes for any course (Torres-Gordillo et al. 2020)
This study is applied in the College of Computer Science (CCS) in the Public University (PU) in the Middle east and Table 2 shows the features and advantages of LOs elaborated by the academic QA in higher education programs in CCS and PU.
Table 2. LOs features and benefit explained by QA (Torres-Gordillo et al., 2020)
Every program has its own requirement for the QA and accreditation process in higher education, table 3 shows the QA requirements in general but these requirements are applied in CCS of PU.
Table 3. QA Requirements expressed for CCS in PU (Pratolo et al., 2020)