Abstract:

In this paper we will show the method to present the curriculum in electronic form consisting of several Excel sheets, in order to make it possible to compute numerical parameters required by Commission for Accreditation and Quality Assurance (CAQA) of Serbia. The accreditation process of Serbian universities and their faculties started in 2007. Each higher education institution was obliged to submit complex accreditation documentation regarding its study programs and the institution itself. For each study program, the most important requirement was to present the structure of the program, which may include multiple modules, the number of students to be enrolled each year, the number of ECTS and duration of the program, as well as the scientific field of the program. According to CAQA standards, the scientific field determines the size of groups for lectures, exercises and labs. Another requirement was to list all professors and their associates engaged in lecturing, with their titles, unique identification numbers, dates of academic election, rights to be engaged in specific forms of teaching, type of employment (regular or part time), and number of classes that they teach in other institutions. For each course, mandatory or elective, it was necessary to present the number of lecture hours, exercise hours and hours in lab (per week), number of ECTS, type of course, total number of hours for all groups, for each type of lecturing and distribution of these hours among teaching staff. A method was defined to join multiple groups from different academic years, different modules and even different study programs, to attend the same course together and therefore reduce the teaching overload of academic staff. All the data items mentioned above were structured in multiple Excel sheets, making it possible to compute numeric parameters required by CAQA, such as number of classes that each teacher lectures, average number of classes for all teachers in the institution, number of classes that students attend per week, percentage of elective ECTS etc. We have developed the software support that generates reports requested by accreditation commission and we have used this method on the majority of higher education institutions in Serbia. The process of collecting these Excel forms at the University of Belgrade, the largest higher education institution in Serbia, consisting of 31 schools that perform academic programs in medicine, engineering, science and humanities, was finished with the development of parser in Java that was used for parsing these data and their import into the database. In this way the collected data about study programs became available on the University Web site, where the programs are presented and can be searched based on multiple criteria.

Keywords:

Accreditation, software tools, curriculum.