Aditya Educational Institutes established their engineering college in 2011 with the sole purpose of providing students high quality of education.  The fully developed classrooms and labs have state of the art equipment and are ideal for the research and development in engineering studies. A team of highly dedicated and qualified faculty, familiar with advanced teaching methods, is another factor for contributing excellent graduates all over the world.

International Accreditation Organization is pleased to grant the membership status to Aditya Engineering College and now this institute can benefit from Increased Student  Enrollments & Retention, can offer Career Services to their Students, can benefit from numerous networking Opportunities, international promotion on IAO Mediums, can access IAO Publications and Events and avail discounts on IAO’s Products and Services.

Being a member of International Accreditation Organization, Aditya Engineering College will also receive a membership certificate and a membership seal which the institute can use on its website and all marketing collateral.

By becoming IAO’s member the institute will be able to offer courses that are internationally recognized and accepted by the education and corporate sector alike. They will benefit from increased students enrolments regionally and internationally and will also be able to retain them. The institute can now offer free career services to its students by benefitting from IAO’s networking opportunities with education providers from around the world. Benaa Alruwad Center will also be promoted on IAO publicity mediums, get access to IAO publications and events and will receive discounts on IAO’s products & services. Being a member IAO will award Benaa Alruwad Center membership certificate and a seal.

Benaa Alruwad Centre was founded with a mission to provide exceptional education with professional consultation and training services to individuals and educational institutions. The centre offers different courses and workshops that help educational institutions improve teaching standards, school management and leadership. Benaa Alruwad Centre also excels in providing a variety of specialized testing services after proper research and study. These specialized tests help students to choose the right academic specialization and career field while others help parents to find out the personality traits of their kids.

Benaa Alruwad Centre also provides different training programs, courses and symposiums for the development and growth of young learners. These programs help prepare students to expand their horizons and become successful professionals in their respective fields.

In the state of Arizona, transfer course articulations are agreed to prior to the student’s taking the courses. Two separate paper publications provide transfer information regarding course acceptance and the applicability of courses to programs of study: the Course Equivalency Guide and the transfer guides.

The Course Equivalency Guide describes how each Arizona public university evaluates each Arizona public community college courses. And the transfer guides, produced by each public university, indicate how the community college transfer courses apply toward specific university degree requirements. These publications are word processing documents which are produced, updated, and distributed annually. The process to produce the documents and the process used to reach transfer articulation agreements across institutions are labor-, time-, and paper- intensive. These manual processes limit the usefulness of the publications. The guides are:

• Out of date before they are printed because equivalency decisions are not published as they are made
• Distributed too late for timely and accurate transfer information used in transcript evaluation, transfer admission, and academic program planning
• Not readily accessible to students because printed copies are cost prohibitive and the format is complex and confusing
• Multiple documents must be consulted to evaluate course work taken in more than one academic year

What they Did?

The state of Arizona joined hands with the State of Ohio. The joint development project utilized the Miami-DARS software, which can also accept EDI transcript information, to articulate courses into their equivalents and to monitor student progress toward degree completion, while applying Arizona’s experience in developing transfer articulation agreements between institutions and in working with transfer students.

The focus of the joint Arizona-Ohio project is to build a prototype computer system known as the Course Applicability System – Prototype (CAS-P). Using the World Wide Web, CAS-P will assist students, advisors, faculty, and administrators from community colleges and universities in obtaining consistent and accurate information about transfer courses and their applicability toward degree completion. In addition CAS-P will employ the Web to enhance communication between faculty and staff who are responsible for making transfer articulation decisions. The result will be a more efficient, more accessible, and –ultimately– a virtually paper-free process to help transfer students move from school to school and earn their degrees in a timely manner

What they Want to Achieve?

The goal of the Course Applicability System – Prototype is to provide a statewide decentralized electronic transfer and advising system. It will provide support for the development and maintenance of the transfer articulation agreements and offer convenient access to all users (administrative, students, and anyone else who has WEB access) to view timely, accurate and reliable information about course equivalencies.  Also, it will provide a place into which transcripts can be entered or fed electronically for evaluation and produce a degree audit which will let the student not only know what courses they still can take at their institution prior to transferring, but also where they stand with respect to obtaining a degree from the transfer institution. It will provide more timely and accurate data for administrative functions such as transcript evaluation, transfer admission and student advisement for their academic program plan and allow more time for the analysis of the transfer data. Ultimately, it will facilitate students transferring among institutions allowing them to personalize their academic experience

Results

The result of this cross-country team effort was a working prototype, delivered after six months of effort. The prototype resulted in:

• A client application used by articulation and curriculum offices for recording the rules governing acceptability, equivalencies, and applicability of transfer courses.
• Server software that marries the rules with courses a student has taken to produce a transfer guide customized for each student.

This web application provides the following features:

• View of transfer course equivalencies, showing how courses taken at one institution equate to courses or requirement categories at another institution
• View of course descriptions, including additional notes such as prerequisites, course outlines, and course competencies
• View of academic programs offered at an institution and the program requirements
• Identification of courses taken at various institutions
• View of customized transfer guide, based on
  • courses the student has taken at various institutions
  • identification of an institution to which the student may transfer
  • the optional identification of the institution at which the student plans to continue taking classes until a future transfer date.

Global Association for Quality Management  is a nonprofit organization and is a global and an Independent Certification body with a wide experience in the certification industry, offering a comprehensive portfolio of internationally recognized certifications including Lean Six Sigma, Project Management, Certified Sales and Marketing Professional™, Business Management Professional™, Certified Cloud Computing Certifications, Premium IT Certifications, Certified Software Tester Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced level certifications, Professional Management, Data Center, Information Security Certifications and many more.

The GAQM has been awarded IAO’s membership owing to the fact that it offers Quality and Internationally Accredited Training and Certification in the field of Management Science and Information Technology. They impart quality education and training in all the certifications they offer and their courses are at par with the Global Standards. IAO has carefully evaluated the organization as unlike other certification bodies they don’t just ask the candidates to pass the exam, rather their main objective is to educate via E-Courses and Virtual Class Room sessions, followed by an exam which the candidate needs to take through the Pearson Vue Testing Center which follows a stringent process of examination. They believe that Certificate is not just a piece of paper; it has a lot of value behind it.

Cadres Maker is an engineering training center dedicated to serve engineers by offering them high quality solutions and training courses to help them improve their career. They offer innovative, creative, and unique learning methods, so the students can improve their community and environment.  They offer courses in engineering, graphics, computer basics and languages.

The institute had applied for IAO’s accreditation by submitting the online application form. The institute then submitted the validation documents required by the IAO to verify the information presented in the application form. Based on a thorough evaluation of institute’s organizational structure, academic programs, students and faculty learning and teaching methods etc, the institute was granted IAO’s candidacy status. An on-site visit will now be conducted which will determine the institute’s eligibility for IAO’s full accreditation.

The university presidents, chief information officers, and other higher education leaders should stress the importance to higher education of accessibility for persons with disabilities, and of having campus technology environments that support it.

In discussing how institutions can realize this objective, leaders should highlight the importance of universal design, the concept that accessibility is best achieved when designed into a product or service from the start. By stressing universal design in the products and services they develop or acquire to support the mission, institutions can create technology environments in which access for those with disabilities will be automatically available.

The campus leaders should also emphasize another important avenue for ensuring access for all to campus IT resources—institutional policy. They note that campus policy in this space first must ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, but it should go farther and encourage alignment with institutional values. For example, in considering IT procurement, they urge colleges and universities to make accessibility a priority in their purchasing decisions. In their view, this entails not just setting appropriate criteria for IT procurement, but also engaging proactively with providers to help them understand and meet the institution’s accessibility needs.

We hope that the institutions use it to more effectively achieve IT accessibility.

The webinar was a part of the IAO webinar serried that IAO organizes for the stake holders to remain updated on the latest information about the education and accreditation industry and benefit from a unique professional development opportunity.   The webinar discussed the emerging trend and need of international accreditation; and how can the educational institutions thrive by choosing to be internationally accredited.

The speakers from the IAO and leading educational institutions educated the participants on how the international accreditation has evolved from the regional accreditation and the role that the national and regional accreditation bodies have played; the reasons why institutions should acquire international accreditation and the benefits associated with it.

About the Webinar

For decades, regional accreditation bodies had been granting educational institutes with primary accreditation after evaluating them on a regional scale. However, as globalization grew, it became extremely important for educational institutes to be acknowledged world over. This gave rise to International Accreditation. The webinar discussed the importance of international accreditation and its global acceptability. It also discussed what role international accreditation agencies can play in promoting, maintaining and improving quality education standards globally through accreditation and continuous improvement process.

Topics of the Webinar

During the 60 minute webinar, the participants were informed about:

• International accreditation and why it is required

• The criteria for international accreditation and how educational institutions can become internationally accredited

• Importance of acquiring international accreditation and how international accreditation ensures the confidence of educational community, general public, and other institutions/ organizations

• Importance of establishing a global setting through which the higher education institutions across the world could get worldwide acceptance and accreditation

Featured Presenters at the Webinar

• Dr. Hadi Al- Rakah, the CEO of Rakah Management Consultancy in Saudi Arabia, discussed how international accreditation assures the quality of academic standards at educational institutions across the globe. His topic covered information about how the international accreditation ensures that the academic programs, faculty and students are up to the international standards.

• The next presenter, Ms. Manisha Gaur, Director Operations, Venkateshwara Group of Institutions, India, started off the webinar on the topic of Need for International Accreditation. She not only discussed the essential meaning of the word international accreditation and its scope but also on the major concepts on Higher Education accreditation and the forecasts and trends on Higher Education (HE) accreditation. Since she hails from India, she discussed these points from the Indian point of view and the happenings in the Indian education and accreditation industry.

• The next to present was the IAO’s evaluation commission member Dr. Varant Zareh Seropian who discussed about the standards of international accreditation i.e. what factors and criterion do international accreditation agencies look for and should look into when granting accreditation to the institutes.

• Ms. Amira Kawas, Founder of Dolphin Nursery & Preschool in Lebanon was the last to present who spoke about the benefits of the international accreditation. She informed the audience on how international accreditation recognizes the institution on a global scale and how it contributes to the international promotion of it, its students, its faculty and staff members etc. and last but not the least how it contributes to the continuous improvement of the educational standards.

The IAO’s webinar was attended by numerous educationists and accreditation professionals from all over the world. It presented an international promotion opportunity for the educational institutes and it also encouraged exchange of information, technology and resources on quality assurance standards and good educational practices on an international level.

“The rapid growth of the education and accreditation sector, combined with changes in technology has brought both opportunities and challenges to the institutions,” said Jeremy Roche, Commission Member, IAO. “This event series is specifically designed to engage the education and accreditation community on how to not only manage, but benefit from these changes.”

 The details of the webinar can be found at: http://iao.org/iao/webinar/watch-video.asp

Synchro Automation is Siemens International’s channel partner and has received “Volume Growth Award” 3 times over the past decade. The organization‘s expertise lies in automation. A typical project for them starts from understanding the customers requirements, designing the required system with hardware and software components, building the control architecture, manufacturing of control systems, on-site installation, software development and commissioning and then offering and supporting the clients with Breakdown services and Annual Maintenance Contracts for the equipments. The organization has been involved in Design, supply and commissioning of following systems for over 12 years:

• Programmable Logic Controllers and Distributed PLC Systems
• AC Variable Frequency Drives/ DC Drives
• Motion control drives and Servo Systems
• HMI/MMI systems
• SCADA , DCS Systems
• Soft starters , sensors, instruments and other automation components
• MCCs, Power distribution Boards,PLC panels, Drive and Instrumentation Panels

They have executed projects in wide range of industries such as Steel sector, Cement Industries, Power, Rubber, Packaging, Glass, Paper, Engineering, Chemical, Infrastructure, Material handling, Water treatment, Food and Beverages, Machine tool industry, Special purpose machines, Education and Training sector, Government sector etc.

The organization applied for IAO’s accreditation through the online application form and submitted the validation documents, based on which the IAO’s candidacy status was granted. To receive IAO’s full accreditation the institute hosted IAO’s evaluation commission member’s on-site visit. During the visit the IAO commission member evaluated the organization’s information about the management, infrastructure, facilities, academic programs, students and faculty. He has presented all his findings and recommendations in the audit report, based on which the decision to grant full accreditation to the Synchro Automation will be taken.

The Hindustan University applied for IAO’s accreditation and filled all the information about the institution, educational offerings and students performance as required in the IAO’s accreditation application form.  To validate this information, the institution also submitted the validation documents that were approved by the IAO’s commission members and upon their approval the institute became candidate for IAO’s full accreditation.

The Hindustan University has maintained an enviable academic excellence right from its inception. They have developed a group of institutions that impart quality education in the fields of Engineering, Aviation, Applied Sciences and Management. The institution has collaborative partnerships with leading Foreign Universities in USA, Singapore, Australia etc. It has students and faculty exchange Programs with leading International Universities. The University also has received numerous accolades and awards over the years. Their student community comprises of students from all over India and Overseas. We have students hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Indonesia, Kenya, Korea, Liberia, Libya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Oman, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sudan, U.A.E, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Tanzania, USA, etc. More than 80% of students secure first class with distinctions year after year. Over 950 students have been placed in leading companies in India and abroad in the last three years. The students of this reputed institution are receiving placement offers from leading companies in India and Abroad.

The Hindustan University will now undergo an on-site visit by the IAO’s evaluation commission member to further verify the information and based on the visit audit report and satisfaction of the IAO team, full accreditation will then be awarded.

E-portfolios have the potential to enhance teaching, learning, and assessment practices. They can also support:

• student advisement and career preparation
• student or alumni credential documentation
• sharing of teaching philosophies and practices
• department and program self-studies
• Institutional and program accreditation processes

Defining E-Portfolios

What is an e-portfolio? An e-portfolio is a digitized collection of artifacts, including demonstrations, resources, and accomplishments that represent an individual, group, community, organization, or institution. This collection can be comprised of text-based, graphic, or multimedia elements archived on a Web site or on other electronic media such as a CD-ROM or DVD.

An e-portfolio is more than a simple collection, however; it can also serve as an administrative tool to manage and organize work created with different applications and control who can see or discuss the work. The benefits of an e-portfolio typically derive from the exchange of ideas and feedback between the author and those who view and interact with the e-portfolio. In addition, the author’s personal reflection on the work inside an e-portfolio helps create a meaningful learning experience.

E-portfolios can also be defined as “personalized, Web-based collections of work, responses to work, and reflections that are used to demonstrate key skills and accomplishments for a variety of contexts and time periods.”While it is impossible to precisely determine how many institutions have adopted e-portfolio systems, their adoption continues to grow.

E-Portfolio Categories

When describing the many uses of e-portfolios, three broad categories emerge: student e-portfolios, teaching e-portfolios, and institutional e-portfolios. E-portfolios have six major functions. They are used to:

• plan educational programs
• document knowledge, skills, abilities, and learning
• track development within a program
• find a job
• evaluate a course
• Monitor and evaluate performance

Numerous e-portfolio models combine these categories and functions.

Implementing E-Portfolios

Institutions ask a number of questions as they implement e-portfolio systems, whether they be student, teaching, or institutional.

• Hardware and software
  • How will an e-portfolio system impact other software systems, such as an institution’s course management system (CMS), student information system (SIS), and databases?
  • How many and what kind of servers will be necessary to hold increasing numbers of e-portfolios? What will be needed to maintain and back up these servers?
  • What plugins, file formats, and browsers will be required or supported in any e-portfolio system?
  • What technologies will be used to implement an offline, portable portfolio that authors can take with them (XML, content packaging, and so forth)?

• Support and scalability
  • Can the e-portfolio system scale adequately as its usage grows and storage expands?
  • Is there an adequate staff to develop, deploy, and maintain the system?
  • Will there be an infrastructure in place to properly train students, faculty, and administrators how to use the e-portfolio system?

• Security and privacy
  • How will Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations impact an e-portfolio system?
  • What policies need to be in place for governing information access, security, and privacy?
  • How will they be determined and controlled?

• Ownership and intellectual property
  • How will an e-portfolio system authenticate that all the work, documentation, and demonstrations were created by the author?
  • Who is the real owner of the artifacts in any e-portfolio (author, institution, both)?
  • Will fair use laws protect users of others’ intellectual property when it is included in an e-portfolio system?
  • What can or cannot be included in an e-portfolio?
  • Who owns the record? Can it be transferred to another institution?

• Assessment
  • What kind of assessments will the e-portfolio system support? What standards (state, special accreditation) will be incorporated into the assessments?
  • How will assessment data be maintained and archived, and for how long?
  • How might student assessment be used to assess the programs they participate in? How might this affect the assessment of the institution?

• Adoption
  • What does the administration expect?
  • How likely is it that students, faculty, and administrators will accept and use the e-portfolio system?
  • Will the system be user-friendly enough for easy adoption?

• Long-term maintenance
  • How will information be maintained over time?
  • What policies are needed for transporting or deleting e-portfolios?
  • How will long-term storage requirements be managed?

E-Portfolio Tool Sets

Institutions use four basic approaches to develop e-portfolio systems.

• Homegrown: An institution’s information technology staff develops a custom system locally.

Pros:

• The institution develops exactly what it wants.
• No software licensing fees are involved.
• The institution owns the intellectual property.

Cons:

• Hardware and software development costs can be prohibitive.
• The system may require too much time and energy to design and build.
• High levels of software development and technical expertise are required to build and maintain the system.
• The institution may not be able to retain expert staff long enough to sustain and scale the system.

• Open source: Open source e-portfolio system software or system modules are publicly available at no charge. The Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) (http:www.theospi.org/), for example, is a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of nonproprietary, open source e-portfolio software. The initiative is led by chartered workgroups and a board that represents a wide variety of higher education institutions. About 20 institutions are actively involved in contributing to the OSPI software development process.

Pros:

• There is no charge for open source software.
• Members of the community participate in shaping the development of the software.
• OSPI is designed to work with the Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org/), a community-source software development effort to build a “collaboration and learning environment” for higher education.

Cons:

• There are costs associated with technical support and maintenance.
• The possibility of an open source initiative dying out and the community disbanding poses risks related to replacement costs.
• Software development and upgrades may not keep pace with needs.

• Commercial: An institution purchases a system from a vendor, similar to any other application provider, which includes the customary licensing and support fees.

Pros:

• No direct software development cost.
• Technical support is handled by the vendor, allowing campus information technologists to focus their efforts on other projects.
• There are well-developed e-portfolio systems from a variety of vendors.
• A CMS may have a built-in e-portfolio solution, keeping the e-portfolio tool within an integrated environment rather than licensing two different applications. A one-stop CMS/ e-portfolio solution may allow for easier authentication of certified learning competencies.

Cons:

• Licensees must adapt to the vendor’s pricing structure, which could increase substantial without adequate notification.
• Customer service and technical support may be poor.

• Common tools: An institution uses common HTML editors, such as Microsoft Front Page or Macromedia Dreamweaver, to support the development of e-portfolios.

Pros:

• More creative e-portfolios are possible because these tools do not lock users into a predefined, structured approach, unlike database- and form-driven e-portfolio systems where users must fill out specific fields and answer questions in order to create their e-portfolios.
• Allows e-portfolio creators to design and enter artifacts in any manner they desire.
• Software cost is low or nonexistent.

Cons:

• Requires students to have Web site authoring skills (for example, an understanding of HTML code) rather than being able to rely on a template-driven approach where students fill out forms to create preformatted Web pages.

Conclusion

Those who have adopted e-portfolios claim they are the biggest educational technology development since the adoption of course management systems. Although promising, e-portfolios are not yet a mainstream higher education technology.

E-portfolios have become a primary way for students, faculty, and staff to document skill sets and reflect on learning, accomplishments, and career goals. Institutions are beginning to realize that e- portfolios are a viable tool that strengthens self-study and accreditation processes. The result is that an increasing number of institutions recognize that e-portfolios are a technology with enterprise-level implications. As e-portfolio applications grow, they need to be integrated across campus systems.

E-portfolios show promise across all types of institutions, disciplines, and applications. We encourage educational institutions to explore the examples provided in this article.