Abstract:

Ensuring engineering education quality becomes more important for the programs and difficult to achieve. There is a huge transfer of knowledge, skills and technology beyond the borders. Therefore, engineering education gains importance as a part of today’s world and the graduates from engineering discipline have the mobility to work or continue to post-education in different countries. Hence, universities and engineering education institutions applied standards, quality assurance methods and accreditation processes to improve quality. As a volunteer-based non-governmental organization, Engineering Education Programs Evaluation and Accreditation Association (Mühendislik Egitim Programları Degerlendirme ve Akreditasyon Dernegi (MUDEK) in Turkish) has regulated the accreditation of engineering programs in Turkey since 2007. MUDEK evaluates engineering programs with an outcome-based evaluation system, specifically, program outcomes (PO). A PO defines the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students must acquire throughout their undergraduate studies. Each PO is attached to one or more course outcomes of the corresponding course. At the end of a semester, each course’s lecturer must prepare a PO average report calculated by averaging the course outcomes for each student. Then, all the PO averages of all courses are merged and form a binary matrix that consists of registered students to the program in the rows and POs in the columns. The matrix shows a detailed analysis of students and whether they satisfy the PO within the scope of contributing courses to the PO. The preparation and merging processes of these matrices are very time and labor-consuming. Besides, archiving and accountability of these matrices bring additional burdens to this process. To address these problems, a web application named PC-Link is developed that performs most of the previously described calculations. The primary objectives of PC-Link are to merge the PO analysis of the courses and to provide a binary matrix that presents the student, course, and PO analysis together. In this paper, the PC-Link application is discussed from a technical perspective and its’ capabilities are presented.

Keywords:

Accreditation, quality assurance, MUDEK, program outcomes, PC-Link software.