The Accountability in Accreditation Committee’s 2021 report is now available for review on Engineers Canada website. This first report is informed by feedback that was collected from regulators, general visitors, program visitors, visiting team chairs and vice-chairs, Engineers Canada Staff, and deans, designated officials or program accreditation leads that received CEAB decisions in 2020 or hosted visits in the 2020/2021 accreditation cycle, and student leadership at HEIs that were visited in 2020/2021. The purpose of the Accountability in Accreditation program is to measure the effectiveness, trustworthiness, transparency, and efficiency of the accreditation system.
In its report, the Accountability in Accreditation Committee makes several recommendations to the CEAB, the Policies and Procedures Committee, and the CEAB Secretariat regarding communication and training needs, messaging for accreditation system stakeholders to clarify intents and purposes, and workflow and scheduling of CEAB products and processes.
In addition to these specific issues, the Accountability in Accreditation Committee recommends continued monitoring for the majority of measures, a necessity given the disruptions to the larger engineering education community caused by COVID-19 throughout the first year’s data collection cycle.
The Accountability in Accreditation Committee wishes to thank all stakeholders who participated in this first cycle of data collection and reporting; it is only through the participation of stakeholders that the CEAB can continue to deliver effective, trustworthy, transparent, and efficient accreditation to Canadian undergraduate engineering programs. The Committee members would like to encourage all stakeholders to contribute their impressions of the system when invited to do so.
Next steps:
- Data collection for the 2022 report has begun.
- The CEAB, P&P Committee and CEAB Secretariat are reviewing the Accountability in Accreditation Committee’s recommendations to determine which annual workplan they should be incorporated into.
- The Accountability in Accreditation Committee is meeting in December to consider possible improvements to the data collection, analysis and reporting process to make improvements for future cycles.
