Introduction
Everyone wants to be academically accepted wherever he/she goes. Academic acceptance is like a passport that allows you to cross the boards. On the market, each manufacturer seeks and works hardly to be at the top. Manufacturers market their products in many brilliant ways and before marketing their products, they seek first to ensure their products high quality because most people won’t spend their money in something not valuable, not cost effective. I think it is the same case with higher education institutions. Students are looking for accredited certificate that allows them to cross the boards. They want to get a job wherever without any arguments.
Moreover, many of them are ambitious and want to continue their higher education to get MA and PHD degree and in this case they need to ensure their Bachelor certificate authorization. This article reviews the institutional quality assurance at The American University in Cairo (AUC). The article will focus on the staff development quality assurance. I think staff development is vital for the success of any institution. That is because any institution depends upon its staff and the institution's staff represents the institution wherever they go; conferences, meetings …etc. Moreover, the rate of development process in many fields is faster than before. So, ones should keep up with these developments and changes and update him/her self regularly. To do so, staff should obtain many skills like time management to be a long life learner and to learn how to learn. I think learning how to learn is like learning how to swim. That is because swimming requires knowing how to deal with challenges and if you do not know how to swim you will not survive and if you do not know how to learn you cannot survive in the 21st century.
Many challenges will face anybody when it is the time to learn something new and we should face these challenges strongly to approve ourselves in the market, in universities and everywhere we go.
Quality assurance at AUC
Everyone wants to be academically accepted wherever he/she goes. Academic acceptance is like a passport that allows you to cross the boards. On the market, each manufacturer seeks and works hardly to be at the top. Manufacturers market their products in many brilliant ways and before marketing their products, they seek first to ensure their products high quality because most people won’t spend their money in something not valuable, not cost effective. I think it is the same case with higher education institutions. Students are looking for accredited certificate that allows them to cross the boards. They want to get a job wherever without any arguments.
Moreover, many of them are ambitious and want to continue their higher education to get MA and PHD degree and in this case they need to ensure their Bachelor certificate authorization. This article reviews the institutional quality assurance at The American University in Cairo (AUC). The article will focus on the staff development quality assurance. I think staff development is vital for the success of any institution. That is because any institution depends upon its staff and the institution's staff represents the institution wherever they go; conferences, meetings …etc. Moreover, the rate of development process in many fields is faster than before. So, ones should keep up with these developments and changes and update him/her self regularly. To do so, staff should obtain many skills like time management to be a long life learner and to learn how to learn. I think learning how to learn is like learning how to swim. That is because swimming requires knowing how to deal with challenges and if you do not know how to swim you will not survive and if you do not know how to learn you cannot survive in the 21st century.
Many challenges will face anybody when it is the time to learn something new and we should face these challenges strongly to approve ourselves in the market, in universities and everywhere we go.
Quality assurance at AUC
The AUC holds institutional accreditation from the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. The accreditation process is conducted each ten years with review in the mid of these ten years.
The academic reputation of any institution is major to its quality. And to have a good reputation, the institution's programs should be tested, assessed and evaluated continuously. One of the school of Continuing Education internal operations is to test and evaluate training and educational programs for quality assurance purposes. Moreover, this school offers this service to external customers like other universities, institutions, companies and governmental and non-governmental organizations. The school conducts these evaluation and testing services to determine the university programs effectiveness, training effectiveness and the quality of professional performance. Such continuous evaluation is critical to any institution to survive and sustain in this era where the higher education enter the market especially distance education. In addition, I think any institution is in need for self reflection to discover its own strengths and weaknesses in order to put strategic plan on how to strengthen more strengths points and overcome its weaknesses.
As cooperation should take place between academics and administrators in terms of ensuring the internal quality, the office of internal audit at AUC leads the university careers on how to use audit methodologies and it is in its try to continuously update its audit approaches. Again, self reflection can help careers to improve themselves and to improve the whole university system and internal operations according to their culture and local context.
Moreover, the internal audit office is responsible of assisting all members of the AUC community to act in accordance with policies and procedures and uphold the highest standards. Some services that the office is responsible to offer are:
· Operational Audits: Examine and evaluate the efficient and effective ways of using function resources.
· Compliance Audits: Determine the degree of a function's adherence to laws, regulations, policies, and procedures.
· Financial Audits: Addresses questions of accounting and reporting of financial transactions, including commitments, authorizations, and receipt and payment of funds.
· Information Systems (IS) Audits: Address the internal control environment of automated information processing systems and how people use those systems.
· Investigative Audits: Focus on civil or criminal abuse of laws or abuse of university’s policies and procedures।
Professional Development
When establishing any center, its vision, mission, goals and objectives should be stated clearly. The AUC established a center for learning and teaching. This center mission encourages excellence in teaching and facilitates the effective use of technology in teaching and learning process in order to stimulate learning. This mission supports the idea of professional development in that it emphasis on the high quality of teaching that for sure will stimulate and motivate students learning. Moreover, this mission cares about enhancing the excellence in teaching throughout the professional and effective use of recent technology. That means the center does not adopt any new technology without conducting needs analysis and writing down the plan of new technology implementation. I think the introduction of new technology in the institution require the center to train its faculty on how to use this technology. All these require deep analysis of such technology coast effectiveness.
To achieve this mission the center wrote down some goals and objectives. First, to ensure the continuous professional development of faculty as educators the center assists them through its services. For example, the center provides them with some training and conducts workshops on new innovative teaching approaches to develop their pedagogical skills of teaching. Workshops materials are uploaded in different formats on the university server, so those who could not attend the workshop can download workshop materials and read them to get an idea about what they have missed. From my point of view, this makes the teaching process more enjoyable and may influence students' attitudes towards learning. Some instructors are fixed with one teaching strategy and from my experience at Sultan Qaboos University; students avoid to take courses with such instructors. I think those instructors did not develop the skill of obtaining new skills and it is very difficult to negotiate with them about recent developments.
As researchers in the education field emphasis these days on the integration between technology and other subject areas in classrooms, the center provide faculty with some programs about exploring the new learning technology to enable them to integrate such technology in the classroom. I believe on this quite "one hand does not clap". Collaboration between people leads to the high proficiency and work quality. As the center believe on that, it collaborates with other libraries and learning technologies units in the application and use of innovative learning technology to enhance teaching and learning process.
The center provides faculty with a number of useful links about teaching strategies to aid them updating their knowledge. It really a great step to gather links about specific topic like teaching strategies on one page to easiness searching process specially for novices. I guess that this step is vital for ensuring the good quality of teaching strategies that academics should follow at AUC. Moreover, this may influence the reputation of AUC and its academic staff.
References:
1. American University at Cairo. (n.d). "Accreditation". Retrieved 28 April 2009. Available at: http://www.aucegypt.edu/aboutauc/Accreditation/Pages/default.aspx
2. American University at Cairo. (n.d). "Continuing Education Admission". Retrieved 28 April 2009. Available at:
http://www.aucegypt.edu/admissions/conted/Pages/default.aspx
3. American University at Cairo. (n.d). " About the Internal Audit Office". Retrieved 28 April 2009. Available at:
http://www.aucegypt.edu/offices/audit/Pages/About.aspx
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