A guide on various aspects of Accreditation and how iCloudEMS automates the groundwork of Accreditation for Higher Education Institutes

India has the largest pool of Universities and Colleges to offer Higher Education but with the increase in the number of Higher Education Institutes, the responsibility also gets increased to maintain quality and standards in education. Globalization has removed the boundaries of learning and innovation; thus, exceptional strategies and efforts are necessary to integrate the Indian education system with world-class regulations such as to explore its true potential. The 21st century education system demands improvement in many horizons of our education system including trained staff, infrastructure, facilities, curriculum, assessment that can develop youth with the competencies such as critical thinking, communication skills, research, problem solving skills etc. Our government has brought many meticulous reforms for the development of a globally competitive Higher Education System and encouraged us to make India, the preferred global destination for higher studies. 

Accreditation and its need: The modern education system is more focussed on the holistic development of students that can inculcate professional and technological skills to make them capable of entering in the challenging world. The quality of education standards is required to be raised or maintained continuously to meet the academic demands of the 21st century. Accreditation is a self-raised process of an educational program or institution that involves a systematic mechanism to ascertain that they meet strict quality operational standards. 

While enrolling for a program in an institute, accreditation is the important aspect to look for the reliability of a degree program or institute to check, whether or not the services meet or exceeds minimum quality standards that becomes helpful to student for choosing recognized institution or program.

Some Important Accreditation Bodies Include:

• UGC (University Grants Commission)
• AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education
•  AIU (Association of Indian Universities)
•  NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council)
•  NBA (National Board of Accreditation)
• NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework)
• AIMA (All India Management Association) 
• DCI (Dental Council of India)
•  DEC (Distance Education Council)
• MCI (Medical Council of India)
•  NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education)
• PCI (Pharmacy Council of India)
• VCI (Veterinary Council of India)
• NCHRH (National Council for Human Resource in Health)
  

The Process of Accreditation is more or less the same for all accreditation bodies. Generally, the whole process includes following phases from registration to results:

Importance of Accreditation: Accreditation plays a significant role due to following reasons:

With reference to the above context, one can easily observe the potential of accredited institutes to ensure accountability in the institutes among students and families for their upskilling and advance learning. To achieve the best place in accreditation, institutes are required to undergo rigorous processes for data and reports compilation. We at iCloudEMS are always assisting Higher Education Institutes in upgrading their quality standards with our ingenious products and services. Our accreditation management system is a cloud-based software
which includes SIS and other modules, and is designed for all types of technical and nontechnical Higher Education Institutes, delivering results in accordance with the Washington Accord, LIMA Accord, and Bologna Process.

• Accreditation bodies typically require an analyse data span of several years, but manually organising and formatting such a large amount of data is a laborious process that is prone to redundancy and missing data. Our cloud-based system makes data administration and formatting compliant with rules much easier.
• With only a few clicks, our system can generate a variety of self-assessment and analysis reports, such as SER/SAR/AQAR/IQAC/AACSB, that are necessary for your institution.
• Today, it is essential to upload data to accreditation portals prior to the visit of a peer team; our unique functions make this process easier, including the ability to use prefilled data on the portal during the multiple-year data collection process.
• The information is primarily requested to be entered via responses to a few predetermined questions with respect to different criteria. Our system facilitates the data and results uploading in the same approach.
• Examining one’s own abilities is an important step in the accreditation process, and reports communicate results more effectively than words. We help faculty members by automating the generation of the main self-assessment report, as well as various supporting reports, during accreditation assessments and qualification analysis.
• Through the compilation and management of data in chronological order, our skilled database verification team examines the standards and criteria to be confirmed.
• Institutes can quickly examine the benchmarking standards and acquire a ready reckoner on the present state using our tiered evaluation procedure.
• Our user-friendly system helps the governing bodies in fair and thorough audit of well-organized data and reports with a couple of clicks only.
  

It can be concluded that iCloudEMS offers well governed digital space to automate and simplify the tedious and repetitive activities of accreditation. Our comprehensive Accreditation management system enables an error-free mapping of learning outcomes with the institute’s mission and vision, for quality monitoring and improvement. Today in the competitive era, it is the best time for Higher Education Institutes to invest in a digital partner like iCloudEMS that can align the workflow with the visionary strategies of the institute to ensure quality assurance and improvement on a regular basis.