My institution is planning to step forward for academic autonomy and we have to take necessary steps for conducting academic audits. What is the importance of academic audit in educational institutions? What are its advantages? What are the areas to be included in this academic auditing? How can we conduct academic audit effectively in an institution? Please share your experiences, opinion and advices in this matter.
See the links, which may be useful to you..
http://www.pasekconsulting.com/2015/02/importance-of-outside-academic-audits/
http://admin.exeter.ac.uk/academic/tls/tqa/Part%2011/11B%20QRF_CAA_Section.pdf
https://www.tbr.edu/sites/tbr.edu/files/Academic%20Auditor%20Guide%202012-2013.pdf
http://hec.gov.rw/IMG/doc/HANDBOOK_FOR_INSTITUTIONAL_AUDIT-2.doc
Academic audit is a procedure of verifying and confirming the performance of academic practices and procedures against planned/standard procedures. It should be annual activity.
The areas to be included are -- Teaching, syllabi, admissions, research, examinations, results, academic decisions and implementation, academic administration, facilities for students, teaching and research infrastructure, institution infrastructure, benchmarking of best practices, citizen charter, etc.
Importance of academic audit is --- Increase the goodwill of institution, Students confidence, teachers up-gradation, helpful in ranking of institution, satisfaction of stakeholders, etc.
Our University is Third Time Ranked/Accredited "A" grade by NAAC, India. We have established a Internal Quality Assurance Cell, that works continuously establishing, maintaining, verifying the academic practices.
Thanks!
There are substantial reasons to do academic auditing as far as the life of an academic institution is concerned. To assess the overall academic works done by academicians and supporting units so that the objectives of the institution upon which its programs are established are met for positive continuous existence.
Public institutions are directly funded by governments and their effectiveness are necessary for continued financial funds which is guaranteed by auditing. Besides one of the most important assets institutions display to attract students is whether they are accredited or not, which validates their degree upon graduation. This process of accreditation also requires auditing of all academic and non academic supporting units for efficiency and for standards.
The academic strength of the faculty, the professionalism, ethical behaviors of the administration and supporting staff and the well equipped state of the art infrastructure to conduct teaching and research for contemporary society are few of the things to be audited.
Auditing academic and research institutions is a common practice, at least in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany (explicitly, at Max Planck Institutes). The process is periodic and the auditing committees consist of members of the academic community (in particular those who are generally recognized by the relevant community as being renown experts in their fields of investigation) who are external to the institutions being audited. For some relevant details, I refer you to the Wikipedia entries on the UK's Research Excellence Framework, and its predecessor Research Assessment Exercise. There are also processes of research appraisal that are carried our internally at different university departments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Assessment_Exercise
Thanks, Sudev for inviting me to this very nice question!
Actually, who should audit the scientific performance and other measures of quality? Is it those same people, who tell you on phone, that you cannot send to them digitally signed documents by E-Mail for further processing?
Academic audit is usually the need of the day. It may be either self driven, which is very rare as it is not explicitly mentioned in the vision of a program or institution, or regulatory body driven in shape of certain reports like higher education commission of Pakistan driven "self assessment reports in universities for particular programs".
Nevertheless it requires the skills of an expert particularly who are having master or doctorate degree in education.
Usually it is assessed by persons who are not expert in education.
Thus Audit of the academic audit should be a component of the program curriculum. It can be narrated in other words as meta cognition of academic audit. Since it is usually driven by regulatory authorities, hence audit of the administration wing should also be there following academic audit before the start of 2nd round of academic audit. Hence for an institution to be viable and dynamic, academic and administration audit should be the complimentary element beside the finance audit.
This requires honesty and mature use of power.
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