Accreditation of Educational Programs in Specialty 015 Professional Education (by Specializations): Challenges and Prospects

Abstract

The study considers the question of quality of providing education by accreditation of educational programs for specialty 015 Professional Education (for specializations). It was defined that nowadays Ukrainian higher educational institutions have broad autonomy in forming content, choosing main approaches, forms and methods of organization of educational process for students of higher educational institutions. The purpose of the article is to define the main problems and challenges the education providers face in the process of realization of educational programs (EPs) for specialty 015 Professional Education (for specializations) for Bachelor level of higher education. Methods. The authors implement the purpose with the help of theoretical research methods (analysis, comparison, systematization and generalization). The results. The authors generalized and organized the results of the accreditation, defined the main strong and weak points of the according EPs, determined the main directions and prospects of their development based on the analysis of the accreditation cases of 27 EPs that had been examined by the National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance for 2020-2021academic years. The research determined that the criteria for the assessment of education quality are considered separately, but they are tightly related. The analysis of the levels of evaluation by experts and members of professional expert council shows that the criterion 2 «The structure and content of an educational program» and the criterion 4 «Studying and teaching accordingly to educational program» are the most problematic. Consequently, these directions require more attention during the improvement of the educational process organization by these educational programs. It is established that that 70% of EPs received accreditation for 5 years, 30% received conditional accreditation for 1 year and no EPs received denial for accreditation. This reports about high level of education process organization for EPs, however, there are still many questions to be considered. Conclusions. The analysis and generalizing of the accreditation materials let us define the main problems and prospective directions of educational programs development. The authors consider that incorporating these aspects can foster the development of EPs and quality of higher education for specialty 015 Professional Education (by specializations) in Ukraine.