Quality experts from Missouri varsity visit Mazoon College
MUSCAT: A quality assurance team headed by Dr Jeffrey Dale Cawlfield, Director of Freshmen Engineering Programme and the member of Higher Learning Commission (HLC) from Missouri University of Science & Technology (MST), Rolla, USA conducted a week visit to Mazoon College, Muscat.
A series of meetings and a workshop on areas such as curriculum revision and mapping, quality assurance and coordination between programmes of different levels were conducted.
‘The visit is to enhance and review the functioning of academic and nonacademic departments of the College in order to provide quality education in the Sultanate. Such external reviews always help the College to improve and asses the functions of academic and non-academic departments,’ said Dr Juma Saleh Salim al Ghailani, Managing Director of Mazoon College.
The review team includes Dr Kathleen Morgan Drowne, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Arts, Sciences and Business and Dr Gregory Gelles, Professor and Chair, Department of Economics.
The first day’s visit was exclusively centred on a meeting with the college Dean, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs and Head of Quality Assurance on the roles of the affiliate body in building relations with Mazoon College.
“The main purpose of this visit is providing information on the best practices in managing, leading, and enhancing the quality of the college academic performance” said Dr Gelles who is the Professor and Chair, Department of Economics, at Missouri University of Science & Technology.
During their second day’s visit, Dr Jeffrey and the team highlighted the importance of curriculum review of all the departments, professional development, and the mechanism to improve the quality of programmes offered at the college departments. The delegates met the heads of the department and representative faculty from each department to discuss the revisions and modifications in the curriculum of each affiliated program. They also conducted a workshop on the curriculum mapping and benchmarking activities and elaborated on the ways Mazoon College can benefit from a cyclical process of curriculum mapping of its affiliated body.
The MST delegates held a highly fruitful meeting with Admission and Registration Department staff on their third day of visit to discuss students’ key performance indicators (KPI’S) and provide information about the process of measuring these KPI’S. Computation of progression and retention rates were two other items on their meeting agenda. After signing of academic certificate, they met with Student Affairs Department to share and discuss the best practises to engage students in various academic and community or extracurricular activities.
They also made a tour of GFP Programme offices and held a meeting with GFP Programme HOD to assess the efficiency of English language programme and the role of programme in supporting the academic departments.
A campus tour has been conducted together with the officials of the College to directly observe the activities and infrastructures that directly support the delivery of the programmes in the College. The departments were also visited to gather feedback on the operations of the departments based on their mandates.
As a part of the Quality Assurance external review process an external verification and appraisals were done in each academic department like review of course outlines by focusing on course description, learning objectives and learning outcomes. In connection to that to strengthen the quality of imparted education the course materials, samples of student assignments or student works, samples of exam question papers and samples of graded exam papers were also reviewed.
Workshop on areas such as curriculum revision and mapping, quality assurance and coordination between programmes of different levels were conducted