The agency tasked with ensuring quality assurance and consistency across the post-secondary education system made a recent stop in Windsor as part of its five-year strategic planning process.
The Ontario College Quality Assurance Service (OCQAS) visited St. Clair College, one of 24 stops the arms-length group is making to meet face-to-face with quality assurance groups within colleges.
OCQAS representatives meet with St. Clair College's Academic Excellence, Quality Assurance and Accountability team on Jan. 30, 2025. (Rich Garton/St. Clair College)
"We want to meet with our partners. We see the colleges as our partners and want to find ways that we can keep supporting them in developing good quality assurance processes," said Karen Belfer, the Executive Director of OCQAS.
"The way we understand quality is not based on benchmarks or indicators. It's based on the idea that the college has processes in place to ensure current and relevant programs that give students the tools to land jobs and become good citizens of the communities in which they serve," Belfer said.
During the visit, Belfer and quality assurance manager Sylvie Mainville met with St. Clair College's Centre for Academic Excellence, Quality Assurance and Accountability team for a roundtable discussion.
"St. Clair is incredible in their quality processes," remarked Belfer. "It has received, time and time again, excellent maturity in the quality audits. And we use St. Clair sometimes as an example of what consistency and good processes mean - and translate to - in colleges."
It's a recognition that Lindi Prendi, the Executive Director at St. Clair's Centre for Academic Excellence, Quality Assurance and Accountability takes immense pride in, but notes everything the College does to ensure quality is primarily about creating positive student outcomes.
"It's all about quality of education for students to prepare them for not only the workplace with vocational skills, but to prepare them with lifelong learning, and those skills that they can transfer to make them successful in the workplace and in general, in their life," said Prendi. "Ensuring quality has other benefits as well, such as enhancing the reputation of the College, because we want people to know that the diploma or degree we give them means something."
St. Clair College has a track-record of highly successful audits, and Prendi said the College is constantly reviewing and updating existing processes and creating new ones as a quality roadmap.
"But it's not only the audits, it's also the key performance indicators, and it is word of mouth, how industry and the community groups praise our students and our graduates, and that is a reflection of those quality processes at work," said Prendi.
The OCQAS team will complete their province-wide College tour in April and hopes to present its updated five-year strategic plan for 2025-2030 to its management board by the end of June.
