CHENNAI: The current systems and procedures for approval, accreditation and ranking of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) has been amended.

National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) does assessment and grading accreditation of HEIs at the Institution level, over five-year block periods.

In addition, the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), now an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of Education, does accreditation of programmes in technical disciplines for either three-year or three year-block periods.

Accordingly, the NAAC will be launching the Binary and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation immediately by making suitable changes in the manuals.

A notification from the ministry said the Binary grading will be largely based on quantitative assessment with very minimum review through an online mode wherever required. Peer Data Validation (PDV) will be adopted to validate the data.

Similarly, it was proposed to expand the ONOD (One Nation One Data) platform to securely capture and manage the entire super set of data used by all the agencies (AISHE, UGC, AICTE, NAAC and NBA).

In addition, for improving the validity and reliability of the data submitted by the HEIs, a novel "Stakeholder Crowdsourcing" methodology has been proposed.

The Stakeholder Crowd will include students, faculty, alumni, industry, parents, and academic and scientific peer groups - effectively society at large, as part of the accreditation and ranking process.