Admas Quality

Training on Quality of Education was given to the Senate members of Admas University College by Doctor Tesfaye Teshome, the Director General of HERQA, on 29 May 2011.

The main objective of the training was to enrich the awareness of the Senate members of the University College on Quality of Education. In his training session, Dr. Tesfaye Teshome covered several important and relevant topics.

Some of the topics discussed in the training were:

¨ diversified concepts on quality;

¨ common elements to all quality concepts;

¨ expectations of an institution or a programme with respect to internal and external consistencies and the outcomes thereof;

¨ importance of quality;

¨ quality assurance and the ways and means of assuring internal quality, and

¨ an overview of the Accreditation and Re-accreditation practices of HERQA.

Admas University College hosted the 5^th Annual National Research Conference on the theme “Quality of Education in Ethiopia” at the Dreamliner International Hotel, Addis Ababa, on 30 April 2011.

alleviating the diversified societal problems observed in different corners of the country…problems need to be solved scientifically, and higher educational institutions - both government and private - should play leading roles in this area.”

The conference was attended by more than 150 participants including senior government and private officials, leaders of private and government higher education institutions, renowned individuals, and other invited guests.

Nine different research papers were presented by researchers from all over the country, i.e., from Addis Ababa University, Mekele University, Madawalabu University, Arbaminch University, Admas University College, the Ministry of Education, Addis Ababa Civil Service Agency, etc.

Distance Education, Learner-Centred Education, TVET, Children’s Schooling, HERQA’s Ten Focus Areas, Internal Quality Assessment, Quality of Education, Women Empowerment, etc. were among the agenda items of the research conference.

Admas University College has been audited for the second time externally on its degree programmes’ offering processes by the Higher Education Relevance & Quality Agency (HERQA) experts. During their visit, the experts examined different working documents of the University College and visited all of the campuses and departments of the University College. Academic Governance and Management System, Academic Programmes and their Organizations, Educational System, Instructors (tutors), Students’ Assessment System, Students’ Admission, Registration, Recording, and Support Services, Academic Environment and Physical Facility, Internal Quality Assurance System, Research Budget, Administration, Results, and Academic Environment Suitability of the Centres were the focus areas of the audit visit. It is ti be recalled that Admas University College is one of the private higher education institutions which voluntarily had audited their performances in the previous external quality audit facilitated by the HERQA.

THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR STANDARDIZATION (ISO)

Part I

By: G. Egziabher Alemayehu (Assistant Prof. Doctor)

Quality Assurance Higher Expert, Admas University College

1. INTRODUCTION

The short name for the International Organization for Standardization is “ISO”, derived from the Greek word isos, meaning “equal”. This name was given by the founders of the Institution to avoid the difficulty of varying acronyms in different languages. For example, the acronym for the name of the Institution in the English language would be “IOS”, and in the French language would be “OIN” for Organisation International de Normalisation. Hence, whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization’s name is always “ISO” (www.iso.org).

This article aims at introducing the ISO and its standards to the new readers and at refreshing the awareness of those readers who already know the subject matter. To this effect, the article is presented in nine sections, i.e., this introduction, the genesis of the Organization, its historical developments, its importance, the practical roles it plays, the beneficiaries of the Organization, the scope of the Organization, the ISO 9000 family, and finally the conclusions.

The existing printed out documents on the subject and the Internet Electronics documents are the main sources of the facts entered in the article.

2. ENESIS OF THE ISO

The ISO was born as a result of the union of two organizations – the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations (ISA), established in New York in 1926, and the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee (UNSCC), established in 1944 (www.iso.org/.../founding). Delegates from 25 countries, meeting at the Institute of Civil Engineering in London, decided to create a new international organization in October 1946. The objective of the new international organization was “to facilitate the international coordination and unification of industrial standards.” The ISO then officially began operations on 23 February 1947 (Ibid.).

3. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF THE ISO

The ISO is an international-standards-setting body comprising representatives of various organizations of national standards. The Organization promulgates world-wide proprietary industrial and commercial standards (www.iso.org). It has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Officially, the ISO is a non-government organization, but its ability to set standards that often become laws – either through treaties or national standards, makes it more powerful than most NGOs (Ibid.).

A meeting in Paris in April 1947 produced a recommended list of 67 ISO technical committees. About two-thirds of these committees were based on the previous ISA committees (www.isi.org/.../early years.htm). By the early 1950s, the ISO technical committees started to produce “Recommendations”, as they were called at the time (Ibid.).

The basic idea of post-war international standardization was to derive International Standards from National Standards, and then to re-implement them nationally (Ibid.).

The first ISO General Assembly was organized in Paris in 1949, which was inaugurated at a public meeting held in the Grand Amphitheatre at Sorbonne University (Ibid.). The President of the French Republic, Vincent Auriol, and the Director General of UNESCO, Jaime Torres-Bodet, attended the General Assembly meeting (Ibid.).

According to the first Annual Review of ISO in 1972, the pace of international standardization accelerated due to the explosive growth in international trade, which, in turn, was caused by the revolution in transportation methods (www.iso.org). By the mid-1960s, a demand for International Standards had developed by multinational corporations, standards institutions in developing countries, government regulatory authorities, etc. (Ibid.). The output of the ISO showed high growth in the 1970s due to the higher emphasis on International Standards than National Standards in the latter half of the 1960s (Ibid.). This phenomenon led to the decision in 1971 to begin publishing the results of the ISO technical work as International Standards rather than Recommendations (Ibid.).

4. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ISO STANDARDS

Standards in general make enormous positive contributions to most aspects of human lives. The ISO standards, the commonest standards practised universally, do contribute more to most aspects of human lives. The following points are some of the important aspects of the ISO Standards (www.iso.org).

¨ Ensure desirable characteristics of products, i.e., goods & services, such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency, and interchangeability at an economical cost;

¨ make the development, manufacturing, and supply of products, i.e., goods & services, more efficient, safer, and cleaner;

¨ facilitate trade among countries and make it fairer;

radiation and environmental aspects of products can contribute to efforts towards preserving the environment.

7. THE SCOPE OF THE ISO’s WORKS

The ISO has more than 18,500 International Standards and other types of normative documents in its current portfolio. Its work programmes range over standards for activities such as agriculture, construction, mechanical engineering, manufacturing, distribution, transport services, medical devices, information & communications technonologies, education, training, research, management, etc.

The ISO collaborates with its partners in international standardization: the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) – standardizing electronics and electrical equipments- and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) - standardizing all telecommunications equipments. These three organizations-all based in Geneva, Switzerland- have formed the World Standards Cooperation (WSC) to act as a strategic focus for collaboration and the promotion of international standardization (www.iso.org).

The ISO collaborates with the UN specialized agencies and other agencies, besides the ITU. Thus, it has close link with (Ibid.):

¨ The World Trade Organization (WTO);

¨ The CODEX Alimentarius – on food and safety measurement, management, and traceability;

¨ The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE);

¨ The World Health Organization (WHO) – on health technologies;

¨ The International Maritime Organization – on sea transport security;

¨ The UN Tourism Organization (UNWTO) – on the quality of services related to tourism;

¨ The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD);

¨ The UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and

¨ The International Trade Centre, etc.

In fact, the ISO technical committees have formal liaison relations with over 600 international and regional organizations. The ISO has also close links with international organizations representing different groups of stakeholders (Ibid.), for example:

¨ The World Economic Forum (WEF);

¨ The Consumers International (CI);

¨ The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and

¨ The International Federation of Standards Users (IFSU)(Ibid.).

Another group of international organizations with which the ISO collaborates is the major international organizations for metrology, quality, and conformity assessments (Ibid).

The ISO does also have regional partners. For example:

¨ The African Regional Organization for Standardization (AROS);

¨ The Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organization (AIDMO);

¨ The European Committee for Standardization (CEN);

¨ The Pan-American Standards Commission (ASC);

¨ The Euro – Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology, and Certification (EACS);

¨ The Pacific Area Standards Congress (PAS), and

¨ The ASEAN Consultative Committee for Standards and Quality (ACCSQ).

8. THE ISO 9000 FAMILY OF STANDARDS

The ISO standards are numerous as we already know. This section deals with the most recent versions of the ISO series of standards, i.e., the ISO 9000 onwards that are mostly in application.

Thus, the ISO 9000 provides the fundamentals and vocabulary used in the entire ISO 9000 family standards. The ISO 9001 Standard is applied in establishing a quality management system (QMS) that provides confidence in an organization’s ability to provide products that fulfil customers’ needs and expectations (www.iso.org/.../iso 9000). The ISO 9001:2008 Standard is a QMS – Requirements Standard. The ISO 9004 Standard gives guidance in a wider range of objectives of a QMS than does the ISO 9001 Standard (Ibid.).

The ISO 19011 Standard is a standard on the area of auditing of QMS and environmental management system. An effective audit based on the ISO 19011 ensures that an implemented QMS meets the requirements specified in ISO 9001 (Ibid.).

There are also management and leadership standards. Thus,

¨ The ISO 26000 is a Standard on social responsibility

¨ The ISO 31000 is a Standard on risk management

¨ The ISO 50001 is a Standard on energy management

¨ The ISO 140001 is a Standard on environmental management, etc.

9. CONCLUSIONS

This article has very synthetically highlighted the basic information on the ISO and ISO Standards. Its aim is, as indicated in the Introduction, to introduce the subject matter to the new readers and to refresh the awareness of those readers who already know the subject matter. The subject matter is a very important issue that is universally applied in all human activities. Therefore, it is very important that everybody knows it clearly for practical purposes. As the subject matter is very broad, it is open for everybody to explore deeper and more comprehensive ideas by using the Internet and the printed literature. Academic activities, as services products, should be considered as part and parcel of the other services products governed by the ISO standards. That is why we are using the ISO 9001:2008 – Quality Management System: Requirements -, which is equivalent to the Ethiopian Standard (ES 9001:2008).

SOURCES:

www.iso.org

www.is.org/.../early years.htm

www.iso.org/.../founding

www.iso.org/.../isostandards

www.iso.org/.../who standards benefit

Quality Practice

and working documents). These internal audits help in two ways. The first one is, they help the institution to check its status in terms of quality, its strengths and weaknesses, areas of enhancement, areas of improvement. We are committed and actually check ourselves based on the reports of the internal audits without sending this internal audit to external bodies. We use it to fill our gaps if there are and we get improved. Second, the purpose of this internal audit is its service for external auditors. Whenever external auditors are in need of knowing our status, we send it to them. By doing this, we might gain further exchanges of information according to the external requirements.

The third one is conducting external audits. As I attempted to explain earlier, to put it on the ground, we are one of the externally audited private higher education institutions by the HERQA. As you know, HERQA has audited about nine government and five private higher educational institutions. What we did was that we first prepared our internal audit. We voluntarily asked them to audit our performances. Then, they sent a certain team of specialised professionals to exhaustively audit our hitherto performances. The team of experts took quite a long time to audit every activity of the University College and gave their feedback reports. The published report was disseminated to the public. What is more important from this report is that we have learned a lot of things. As a result, we did the following activities. The first activity we did was preparing an enhancement plan. This enhancement plan, as I said, is developed to fill perhaps the possible gaps observed in the external audit report and enhance what have been considered as areas of strength of the University College to maintain them in a better way. This enhancement plan is very essential because not only does it fill in the gap observed and enable us to continue our strengths but also it enables us to see where we belong to. We compare ourselves with the other private high education institutions, in general, and the requirements of the expected standard of quality of education nationally and internationally.

The other point is conducting periodical visits by our experts in the quality assurance department. At least, they monthly conduct visits to different offices and accordingly, they note different issues and they appreciate areas of strengths they observed. More essentially, they focus on the areas of improvements and in that way, a lot of issues that concern quality are addressed.

Another activity that we do is attempting to solicit international and national certifications, like the quality award being prepared by Ethiopian Quality Award Organization, and ISO certifications. These and other activities are being accomplished specifically in the university college.

AQ: Would you please add some more measures that are being taken to assure quality? Some specific measures if there are?

Ato Molla: As I said, we are doing everything based on the plan and the major components and the kernel elements included in the plan are the points I mentioned earlier. Based on these, we take measures if there are areas where we don’t comply with these activities or with these intentions.

AQ: So, in connection to this, what do you think is expected of the University College community to assure quality?

Ato Molla: The first thing is every one of us is required to be so sensitive to quality of education in general. We shall not see this as something sponsored by the government bodies. It is for that matter a matter of existence. To be or not to be. The point is that we must be sensitive to quality of our activities is the first thing. The second is, we are supposed again to be aware of the quality premises of the University College while the University College has put in its legislation, strategic plan, and its annual plan about quality issues. The third point is, we ourselves have to work in line with quality standards. It begins with working in a principled way for instance. Serving as public servants, we are supposed to serve the public diligently, with the best service that we can deliver. So, it starts from each one of us. So, let’s be quality ourselves.

Finally, there are different do’s and don’ts, rules, and regulations as the University College prepares to assure quality of education. As members of the University College, we are not only responsible, have the moral to, but also obliged to implement them.

AQ: How about some more activities to be done in the future in order to assure quality?

Ato Molla: I do not want to specify each activity to be done in the future. As you know, we are going to prepare the next five-year Strategic Development Plan and we will evaluate all successes of the past five-year Strategic Development Plan. When we revise the strategic plan, there will be different issues based on our evaluation which will be incorporated in the coming Five- year Strategic Development Plan.

AQ: Finally, if you have something that you want to convey to the University College community and the public at large on quality matters.

Ato Molla: Lets work for excellence.

AQ: I thank you very much.

Ato Molla: You are welcome.

News Flash

With an initiation of taking part in the 2011 Ethiopian Quality Award Contest, Admas UC has completed the EQAO Contest Document and submitted it on 16 July 2011. The document was worked out by a technical team organized for the same purpose whose members were drawn from all units of activities of the University College. The worked out document has seven criteria, i.e., Leadership, Policy & Strategy, Resources Management, Process Management, Customer Satisfaction/Focus, Business Performance, and Impact on Society. This task was a very challenging one for all of the stakeholders of the activities of the University College who devoted one full Saturday to discuss the completed draft of the document.

A Documentation Unit has been established to operate under the Quality Assurance Department of Admas University College in accordance with the decision of the Management of the University College. The Unit is expected to discharge the activities below:

¨ following up whether meetings and other events of all offices and organs of the University College are carried out as scheduled and ensure that their indicators are documented in the respective offices and organs as well as centrally;

¨ ensuring the existence of a proper documentation system at all levels and organs in different ways;

¨ preparing documentary films bi-annually;

¨ enabling the University College to be proactively ready for internal and external audits/visits by preparing sound, continual, and comprehensive audiovisual and printed documents;

¨ preparing short-term trainings and workshops for the University College workers who have direct relations with documentation and record management.

HERE AND THERE

A Leading Advice

By: Getaneh Abebe

Quality Assurance Expert

Man’s tendency towards his/her belief is:

¨ appreciation;

¨ adoring;

¨ talking good about it;

¨ always like to hear good about it;

¨ dreams the best about it;

¨ attempts to protect it with all his/her might;

¨ hates to hear bad about it;

¨ hates to listen as well accept its true weakness.

¨ If someone else intends to show his/her views about it, the reaction would be to:

be unwilling to give ears;

be protective;

show abhorrence;

fight bluntly in favour of it; this in turn reveals his/her primate nature.

So, according to Abram Maslow let’s develop our self- esteem which is the value each of us places on our own characteristics, abilities and behaviours. This can be realized partly, if we develop the desire of listening to others. Through listening, we get information. Information is knowledge. Knowledge leads us to have wisdom. For which we all strive for. Wisdom uncovers the highest developmental stage of a person; which gives us the key to an unquenchable life and sweater philosophy of life.

Quotable Quotations on Quality

Explored by Doctor G. Egziabher Alemayehu

(Assistant Prof. Doctor, QA Higher Expert)

l “The qualities of a great man are vision, integrity, courage, understanding, the power of articulation, and profundity of character.” – Dwight David Eisenhower

l “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after low pricing is forgotten” – Leon M. Cautillo.

l “The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim.” – Sun Tzu.

l “Many individuals have, like uncut diamonds, shining qualities beneath a rough exterior.” – Juvenal.

l “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” – Henry Ford.

Source: www. Bing.com/search? /Quality Quotations/

Call for article contributors

Dear readers, you are kindly requested to contribute articles, quotable quotations or other quality related issues for our biannual publication. We thank you in advance for your contributions.

Contact Address

Admas University College

Department of Quality Assurance

P.O. Box 2618

Addis Ababa