Advisory Meetings to Foster Quality Assurance in Academic Programs

Abstract

Quality assurance in higher education has become a critical issue for academic organizations to foster better learning experience for students. Different accreditation and ranking agencies also highlight the need to implement different quality practices in their academic processes. Stakeholder's feedback is an important input for academic organizations to meet their quality expectations. Forming an advisory team for academic programs representing all stakeholders can be a good tool to bridge the weaknesses of academic programs as well as improving the perception of stakeholders. Therefore, it is important that such advisory meetings should be well planned to reap all the desired benefits. In this chapter we present a case study of practices adopted to convene advisory meeting in an ABET accredited information system program in Saudi Arabia. Based on our experience, we present a framework to optimally schedule the advisory meetings for academic programs. This framework can help other academic institutions to optimize the benefits of advisory meetings.