4 Program Review at Mohawk College

Goals of Program Review

Academic Program Review is one cornerstone of Mohawk College’s quality assurance strategy.

This is conducted primarily to:

• Assess the program against established provincial and college standards.
• Examine innovation or alternative teaching/learning/assessment practices.
• Examine issues related to student access, success and satisfaction.
• Ensure that all program/course changes are informed by student and industry feedback.
• Determine if the program adequately prepares students for changing job markets, market demands and/or for transitions to further study.
• Establish and implement an action plan for the program.

Types of Program Review

There are two levels of program reviews conducted at Mohawk College:

• The Comprehensive Program Review (conducted every five years), and
• The Annual Review

Note: Programs that undergo a Comprehensive Review are not required to complete an Annual Review in the same year.

Comprehensive Program Review

An extensive Comprehensive Program Review conducted every five years evaluates the program against the program quality standards and industry trends. This provides program area faculty the opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments, challenges, and overall effectiveness of the program they represent, exception being undergoing external accreditation.  The College ensures that programs undergoing external accreditation provide robust data and information that aligns with the College’s program quality requirement, and where such requirements are inadequate, Program Quality Team (PQT) works with program areas to ensure program quality is met.

Comprehensive Program Review is a five stage process and is estimated to be covered over a twelve (12) month period, involving several internal and external stakeholders.

Figure 1 Briefly outlines the stages and some of the activities included at each stage. If you prefer plain text, it is available.

Resources for Conducting the Program Review

The college makes available numerous resources to the Program Review process through various units. The Curriculum Design Specialists (CDS) and Program Quality Team (PQT) will support you to identify important stakeholders to involve in the review process, including but not limited to:

• Program Quality Team
• Centre for Teaching & Learning
• Institutional Research
• Finance
• Pathways and Credit Transfer
• Marketing and Recruitment
• Student Success Advisors
• Accessible Learning Services
• Indigenous Services
• International and Partnership

The Comprehensive Program Review Process

Figure 2 below illustrates the timelines, operational stages, and process that are implemented during the comprehensive program review process. Alternate access is also provided.

The Annual Program Review

Policy Alignment

In keeping with Policy #AS-2000-2013 (Program Quality Policy), Mohawk College is committed to academic programming excellence (Sec. 4.1). Accordingly, the college is committed to regular review, restructuring, reorganization, and enhancement of the academic programming complement as an essential strategy to keep pace with demographic shifts, changing employments trends, global competition, and student and employer needs (Sec. 4.6).

It is in this light that every program offered at the college embarks upon continuous enhancement through an Annual review, thereby providing the college with a basis for the comprehensive planning process, while also assessing the status of recommendations/action plan items resulting from the Comprehensive review process.

Procedures for Conducting Annual Program Reviews

At the end of each Comprehensive review, each program develops a set of actionable items to be completed leading up to the next scheduled Comprehensive review (a 5-year cycle).

Annually, the status of action items from Comprehensive program reviews will be managed through Curriculum Committees, who will report to their respective Associate Deans. This will culminate in an Annual Program Area Report.

For more information on curriculum committee meetings, see the Curriculum Committee Terms of Reference and Report Template (Figure 3) located under the Office of the VP Academic on MyMohawk.

Check Your Understanding

Before you move to the next chapter, solidify your understanding of the different types of Program Review undertaken by Mohawk College.