NACOR has decided to become an accrediting body, and all public Canadian opticianry schools and ourselves have agreed to achieve NACOR accreditation to aid in labour mobility for Opticians. Georgian College volunteered to undergo the first NACOR accreditation, which recently completed its Audit stage.
NACOR accreditation details and requirements are very extensive, and can be found in Nacor's website. Until this time, all public Colleges had only a simple reporting function to be done annually... ie. that it stayed within its budget, etc and the program was reviewed by the public College's Regents and government every 5 years to determine if government funding would continue.
A very detailed NACOR 'Self-Study' document is produced and, once approved by NACOR, an independant AUDIT TEAM (consisting of an opticianry instructor, a NACOR official and an accreditation expert) attends at the school to verify its contents. Then NACOR decides whether to grant a full, a partial or a denial of accreditation status.
www.naco.ca
BC College of Optics is a private-school and the Private Career Training Institute Agency (PCTIA) performs a similar accreditation function for Career Colleges. But whereas the NACOR accreditation consists of a curriculum accreditation, the PCTIA accreditation performs the same curriculum audit and also examines the entire school itself, including administration, building, refund policies, Enrolment Agreement, advertising, etc. to ensure student protection.
The PCTIA Audit Team chosen to verify our BC College of Optics self-study materials included a representative of our regulatory College of Opticians of BC (COBC) as opticianry expert, a UBC department head as administrative expert, and an accreditation expert from PCTIA. Our accreditation was granted almost 10 years ago, in Oct 1998, and has been renewed annually since.
www.pctia.bc.ca
Bookmarks