A Web Application to Assist in Preparing for ABET Accreditation
ABET accreditation is a certification of an educational program’s quality and ensures that a program continually meets specific criteria. The process of creating an ABET accreditation report is burdensome and time consuming. It requires several pieces of information from multiple sources to be collected manually and included in the report. The current practice is error-prone and requires the effort of an entire faculty and administrative staff. While there have been previous efforts made to automate the evaluation of outcome assessments, little can be found on automating the data collection process. This work presents a web-based application software tool to automate data collection and report generation efforts in preparing an ABET accreditation document. A combination of web crawling, data parsing and retrieving data from third-party applications such as Canvas LMS via API calls, have been used to gather information that is usually performed manually. Information collected include courses offered by the department, assignments of each course, student submissions, and their scores, among others. The web application tool features an intuitive user interface that allows users to add courses and assignments manually or pull them from Canvas, add outcomes to courses and map them to ABET outcomes, and generate course reports and tables with one click of a button. The tool has the potential to automate a large part of the accreditation process, reducing manual effort by a considerable amount.
Committee: Simanta Mitra (co-major professor), Gurpur Prabhu (co-major professor), and Carl Chang
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