Institute of Learning · University · orientation

Read this first

What this site is

University is scored every year by the Ministry on 24 indicators, and the score depends less on how well the university performs than on whether the evidence of that performance exists when the Ministry asks for it. In August 2026 University's score rose 19 points in 17 days without any change in performance: the data had simply been submitted. That gain is fragile, because it came from a manual effort rather than from a process.

This site holds the process. Fifty-one workflows, each a controlled document, each designed so that the data the Ministry needs is a by-product of doing the work rather than a reporting exercise afterwards. The site is generated from those documents; nothing here is edited by hand, and a change to a workflow is a pull request that republishes everything.

How to read a workflow page

The header tells you which pack and family the workflow belongs to, who owns it, which KPIs it produces and which it contributes to, what starts it and what ends it. The diagram is generated from the procedure: lanes are the roles in the RACI, boxes are the numbered steps, a cylinder marks a capture point and names the KPI it feeds, a diamond is a decision. Click a task and the page scrolls to that step. Below the diagram is the full document. On a phone the diagram sits behind a button and the steps come first.

The pages beyond the workflows

How it fits together: one figure showing the three artefacts of a process (the document people sign, the model that runs, the registry both cite), what is generated from them and what comes back. how the 51 workflows hand off to each other and which produce which KPIs. Start with the family overview. Data lineage: the 298 data elements the academic workflows generate, where each lands, and which unit collects it. Capture to Score: the platform design on Microsoft 365, traced through one placement. Scenario Lab: the simulator for ranking decisions by their effect on the score over three years.

Who owns what

IoL Academic Affairs owns the 26 academic workflows and the KPI values. IoL Administrative Affairs owns the 25 administrative procedures and, as services to both, document control, records, data protection, contracts, master data and the platform. Quality and IQA reports to the Dean, independent of both, so that its second signature on a classification decision means something. The seam between the packs, 62 hand-offs, belongs to joint OBEF governance.

Glossary

OBEF: Outcome-Based Evaluation Framework: the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research's scoring of every university on 24 KPIs across six pillars, published as the Higher Education Performance Compass dashboard.
KPI: One of the 24 indicators. Numbered pillar.indicator, so 3.2 is the second indicator of pillar 3, Partner Collaboration. Each has a weight, a formula and five published thresholds.
Anchor: One of the five threshold values per KPI in Appendix A of the OBEF guide. The top anchor is the value at which a KPI scores 100. Because anchors are fixed rather than relative to other universities, a target is knowable in advance.
CHEDS / HEDB: The Ministry's higher education database and its Master API, through which University submits 14 of the 24 KPIs. Data arrives as fixed template columns; the workflow documents name the exact column.
Track A / Track B: Track A: the 14 KPIs University submits itself (48 percent of the score). Track B: the 10 the Ministry computes from surveys, Scopus and rankings (52 percent). Track B is influenced through contact data and response rates, not through submission.
Capture point: The step in a workflow at which a piece of data must be recorded, by a named role, so that it exists when the KPI is computed. Data reconstructed at reporting time is expensive and hard to defend; data captured at the point of occurrence is nearly free.
Capture as a gate: The design rule that a record cannot be saved without the fields a KPI needs: a placement without a named supervisor, a project without a launch year. It is what turns capture from a request into a by-product.
Register: A table IoL must keep because a KPI definition requires it and no CHEDS template holds it: alumni outcomes (R1), placement supervisors (R2), assessment item reuse (R4), research impact (R7), events (R8), among others.
Redistribution: The OBEF rule that, in four named programme-level cases (3.4, 5.2, 5.3, 6.2), the weight of a KPI that does not apply is spread across the other KPIs in its pillar rather than scored zero. Reallocation, not free points.
Pack: The academic pack: 26 workflows (WF-01 to WF-26) owned by IoL Academic Affairs. The administrative pack: 25 procedures (AW-01 to AW-25) owned by IoL Administrative Affairs.
Family: A group of related workflows. A to G are academic, H to N administrative. Family C, for example, is work-based learning.
RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. Every workflow states one accountable role per decision. The RACI roles become the lanes of the BPMN diagram.
BPMN 2.0: Business Process Model and Notation, ISO/IEC 19510. The diagram standard used on every workflow page: lanes are roles, boxes are steps, cylinders are capture points, diamonds are decisions, a clock is a calendar trigger.
Interface: A stated hand-off between two workflows. The interdependency map draws all 355 of them; 62 cross between the two packs.
Collecting unit: The department that actually records a data element. Fourteen units capture the academic pack's data; the data lineage page shows which.
Appendix B evidence: The supporting evidence the Ministry may demand without notice for any submitted KPI: contact data, agreements, attendance lists, raw survey responses. Every workflow's records section says what must be retrievable.
Scenario Lab: The simulator: switch decisions and capture rates, see the year-one to year-three trajectory of the programme-level score. Its two assumptions, the band-to-score mapping and the treatment of an unsubmitted KPI, are controls on the panel.