PAL5 (2017-2020)
Academic Programme Review (APR)
Following the success of the British Council CEQA Programme, plus the development of a revised Institutional Accreditation Framework, MoHE and the British Council decided that next iteration of PAL project focus on supporting MoHE to develop clear policies and processes for the review of academic Programmes.
MoHE established the National Committee for Programme Review (NCPR), comprising Vice Chancellors for Academic Affairs from 11 leading public universities and 1 private university, plus 3 MoHE Departmental Directors.
British Council provided technical support to the development and working of the NCPR.
Since Aug 2017, the Committee developed a new APR Policy, and four processes that sat within this policy:
- New Programme Approval (NPA)
- Annual Programme Monitoring (APM1)
- Periodic Programme Review (PPR2)
- Programme Suspension, Merger and Closure (PSMC)
Two processes (APM and PPR) were piloted during 2017-18 at the 12 “Committee” universities, after which processes were finalized and an (ambitious) implementation timetable was agreed.
To support the implementation of APR processes initially within the Committee universities and then within all public and private HEIs, a National Training Team (NTT) was established consist of 20 faculty members from 12 universities.
So far NTT has been trained in APM and PPR and the plan is to deliver two more workshops by April 2020, one training for NTT to focus on the remaining two processes of APR, NPA and PSMC and one training for NCPR to update them on the progress and support them on how to embed the APR processes within their routine activities.