Smart rubric-based systematic model for evaluating and prioritizing academic practices to enhance the education outcomes

Abstract

Recently, the impact of free-market economy, globalization, and knowledge economy has become a challenging and focal to higher educational institutions, which resulted in radical change. Therefore, it became mandatory for the academic programs to prepare highly qualified graduates to meet the new challenges, through the implementation of well-defined academic standards. For this reason, the National Center for Academic Accreditation & Evaluation (NCAAA) in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) defined a set of standards to ensure that quality of education in KSA is equivalent to the highest international standards. NCAAA standards contains of good criterions to guide the universities in evaluating their quality performance for improvement and obtain NCAAA accreditation. However, implementing NCAAA standards without supportive systems has been found to be a very complex task due to the existence of a large number of standard criterions, evaluation process occurs according to personal opinions, the lack of quality evaluation expertise, and manual calculation. This, in turn, leads to inaccurate evaluation, develops inaccurate improvement plans, and difficulty in obtaining NCAAA accreditation. Therefore, this paper introduces a systematic model that contain smart-rubrics that has been designed based on NCAAA quality performance evaluation elements supported with algorithms and mathematical models to reduce personal opinions, provide an accurate auto-evaluation, and auto-prioritization action plans for NCAAA standards. The proposed model will support academics and administrative by facilitating their NCAAA quality tasks with ease, an authenticate self-assessment, accurate action plans and simplifying accreditation tasks. Finally, the implementation of the model proved to have very efficient and effective results in supporting KSA education institution in accreditation tasks that will lead to enhance the quality of education and to obtain NCAAA accreditation.