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| Accountability and Accreditation |
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| A question was recently asked on the scoping forums in reference to the online scoping training programs not meeting educational institution's guidelines. |
This page is being developed because SMA has been working on accreditation for over six months
and has been in negotiations with one educational institution for three months.
Receiving accreditation, to me, is the ultimate goal in any educational program. As some of you may
know, my background is in early childhood education but I have been developing all kinds of programs
in the last 10 years that show my success and accountability.
One of those programs was in working for the State of Iowa. Talk about accountability. When you
are working with a state entity, trust me the entire aspect of your daily work is all about accountability.
What is accountability?
Accountability is how you measure what programs are doing that makes a difference in the outcome. It
has to be put into a "measurable" form.
I have had training and was being held accountable for all of the programming and monetary spending I
did within that program for five years.
So I know how to measure if the program that is put into place, implemented and evaluated is making a
difference. And by the way, it's not about me. It's about what the program does.
That is also why SMA developed a tool for measuring its success a year ago by testing scopists to see
if they have the skills necessary to do the job.
Tools that are developed to measure performance will do their job and show whether a person has the
skills or not. One of the main differences in the tools that SMA uses is that SMA requires scopists to
be tested with audio.
To the best of my knowledge, no other training program and possibly even all of the 2-year colleges
are doing that. If someone knows differently, please let me know.
The audio is critical for the contextual learning aspect of scoping. And there is a critical need for
scopists to be well-trained because of the great amount of work that court reporters are doing.
More will be added to this in the future.