Abdul Hamid M. Ragab

Higher education quality assessment model: towards achieving educational quality standard

This paper presents a developed higher education quality assessment model (HEQAM) that can be applied for enhancement of university services. This is because there is no universal unified quality standard model that can be used to assess the quality criteria of higher education institutes. The analytical hierarchy process is used to identify the priority and weights of the model criteria and their alternatives. The model has 3 levels with 8 main objectives and 53 alternatives. It included e-services criteria, which is one of the recent modern university components, in addition to new sub-criteria for enhancing the model. It produces important recommendations for university higher authorities for achieving demanded quality services. A questionnaire was developed to examine the quality criteria for evaluating the model at King Abdulaziz University, as an applied case study. The model proposed is flexible and can be applied in many other universities.

Recommending degree studies according to students’ attitudes in high school by means of subgroup discovery

AbstractThe transition from high school to university is a critical step and many students head toward failure just because their final degree option was not the right choice. Both students’ preferences and skills play an important role in choosing the degree that best fits them, so an analysis of these attitudes during the high school can minimize the drop out in a posteriori learning period like university. We propose a subgroup discovery algorithm based on grammars to extract itemsets and relationships that represent any type of homogeneity and regularity in data from a supervised context. This supervised context is cornerstone, considering a single item or a set of them as interesting and distinctive. The proposed algorithm supports the students’ final degree decision by extracting relations among different students’ skills and preferences during the high school period. The idea is to be able to provide advices with regard to what is the best degree option for each specific skill and...

A Nonlinear Goal Programming Model for University Admission Capacity Planning with Modified Differential Evolution Algorithm

This paper proposes a nonlinear Goal Programming Model (GPM) for solving the problem of admission capacity planning in academic universities. Many factors of university admission capacity planning have been taken into consideration among which are number of admitted students in the past years, total population in the country, number of graduates from secondary schools, desired ratios of specific specialties, faculty-to-students ratio, and the past number of graduates. The proposed model is general and has been tested at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the work aims to achieve the key objectives of a five-year development plan in addition to a 25-year future plan (AAFAQ) for universities education in the Kingdom. Based on the results of this test, the proposed GPM with a modified differential evolution algorithm has approved an ability to solve general admission capacity planning problem in terms of high quality, rapid convergence speed, efficiency, and robustness.

SCADM: A Developed Smart Classroom Acoustics Design Model for Enhancing Educational Environment@@@نموذج مطور لتصميم الصوتيات داخل الفصول الدراسية الذكية لتحسين البيئة التعليمية

The quality and efficiency of learning and teaching processes in academic universities depend on many important factors. Acoustic quality within the learning environment of the classroom and its surroundings is one of the most important factors that affect the quality of the learning process. Several studies and researches focused on the subject of acoustical comfort in university classrooms. In this paper we study smart classroom acoustics design issues required to achieve high quality acoustics conditions. These designing issues include inside and outside noise sources, designing for optimum reverberation time, selection of sound insulation and acoustical treatment materials, designing for speech intelligibility, and auralization inside the KAU classrooms. The aim is to suggest a developed smart classroom acoustics design model (SCADM) that can be used by architects, acoustics engineers and designers in an early stage of classroom design in order to achieve the acoustical conditions of KAU university classrooms. The goal of this research is to raise the quality and efficiency of the educational environment to reach an excellent learning environment, and hence increasing students learning outcomes.