Doha: The Higher Education Affairs Sector at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education organised a virtual seminar on impact of COVID-19 on academic accreditation and the lessons learned from it.
Representatives of higher education institutions in the country and a number of specialists in higher education from outside the State of Qatar participated in the seminar.
Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Dr. Ibrahim bin Saleh Al Nuaimi stressed in his speech the importance of academic accreditation as one of the very important functions of higher education institutions, as it works to document the credibility of their academic programmes and also ensures stakeholders the quality of educational outputs.
Al Nuaimi said that the State of Qatar has 34 public, private and military higher education institutions and the Ministry of Education and Higher Education seeks to activate academic accreditation by forming a committee to oversee the quality of learning outcomes in each institution. Former Vice President at Qatar University (QU) for Institutional Planning and Development Dr. Saif Al Suwaidi discussed the experience of QU and the importance of accreditation for higher education in the country. He also explained the mechanisms and procedures for internal and external academic accreditation.
Al Suwaidi presented an explanation of the importance of academic accreditation as a way to enhance institutional quality and raise the level of academic programs for higher education, which are offered by 34 universities and institutions of higher education in Qatar to more than 39,000 students, according to the Ministry’s statistics for academic year 2019-20, with an increase of double the number of higher education institutions from 16 universities and institutions in 2014.
He indicated that the QU reform project, which was launched in 2004, placed among its priorities the focus on obtaining academic accreditation for the university’s colleges, such as the College of Engineering in 2009, the Foundation Programme in 2010, the College of Education in 2011, and the College of Mass Communication in 2013, in addition to the rest of the colleges and academic programs, mentioning the international accreditation institutions that supervised the process.
In turn, an expert on accreditation standards at the European Quality Assurance Agency Dr. Anka Greyer discussed the European and British accreditation system and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on accreditation standards and reviewed a set of experiences of the transition towards digital academic accreditation remotely.
She also discussed the challenges facing the electronic academic accreditation process, including the occurrence of technical problems when organizing virtual meetings, the time-wasting before reaching an agreement between the parties, and the need to clarify tasks sufficiently to prevent any ambiguity or confusion when implementing academic accreditation procedures.
