Resumen de Sustainable practices in technical education: a quality assurance framework
Issam Damaj, Ashley Ater Kranov
The termsustainabilitymeans usingmethods, systems andmaterials to meet the needs of the presentwithout compromisingthe future. Even with the prevalence of the term and its wide use across disciplines, there has been little effort to formulate aquality measurement framework in tertiary education based on the values and characteristics of sustainability. Theframework that we present here is the Sustainability of Technical Education (SoTE), wheresustainabilityis defined as theability to continuously improve without reducing the capacity to endure. The SoTE consists of criteria, measures,indicators,and aset of alignedanalytic rubrics thataid the calculation ofdifferent indicatorsincluding a one mainindicatorcalled the Sustainability Indicator. In this paper, we present the need for a focus on sustainability in higher education forcontinuous improvement and fiscal purposes, present the SoTE criteria and indicators, and present the results and analysisof a pilot study conducted at a private, non-profit university in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Region. The paperconcludes with a discussion of the usefulness of the SoTE for continuous improvement and for collecting and providingevidence for quality assurance and accreditation organizations at programmatic and institutional levels.
