The Quality Assurance & Institutional Effectiveness team organized a workshop on Orientation to QA & IE Portal for all colleges of Gulf Medical University during the 1st and the 2nd week of November 2020. The objective of the workshops was to provide an orientation to the Deans, Associate Deans and Program Directors/Coordinators from all colleges of GMU to the new centralized QA&IE platform. Prof. Sherief, Vice Chancellor Quality & Global Engagement and Dean highlighted that the Quality Assurance process of GMU is at the heart of the achievement of Institutional Goals, Institutional effectiveness and hence the Institutional sustainability. As an initiative toward continuous quality enhancement, the QA&IE unit has designed a new centralized QA&IE platform using CASPIO (online database management system).
The workshop introduced the audience to the new platform which facilitates the college/program teams by providing a central access point for the submission of Course Files, Annual reports, Meeting Minutes, Student & Faculty engagement activities, Mentor Evaluation of Mentees, Faculty Workload and class size data. Additionally, the portal provides college/program teams access to their Key Performance Indicators, Research Publications statistics, Survey reports and University publications such as Strategic plan, Factbook, policies & procedures, QA&IE manual and terms of reference of all committees. The session also highlighted key benefits from the new portal which include the availability of a common template for each submission, continuous submission of data throughout the academic year, graphical presentation of data to ease in decision making and monitoring & follow-up by the QA&IE unit. Moreover, each faculty member can directly download reports and data for the preparation of Self Study or Annual Reports from the QA&IE portal without much dependence on the QA&IE team. Updated policies and procedures are also open to the public with an option to search for any keyword to facilitate accessing the most relevant policy. This initiative will definitely improve collaboration between the QA&IE unit and the colleges in addition to providing a centralized system for accessing institutional data.