NEWS RELEASE
CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
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The Central Michigan University/Ontario College Administrative Staff Association Outstanding Research Award for 2018 was presented to Heather Raikou, an Academic Quality Officer at Georgian College. The award was presented to Ms. Raikou on June 25, 2018 at the OCASA Leaders and Innovators Professional Development Conference in King City. The award is sponsored jointly by CMU and OCASA.
Ms. Raikou’s capstone paper The Co-Curricular Transcript as Evidence in Quality Assurance Assessments was completed as a requirement for her Master of Arts in Education degree through CMU’s Ontario partnerships, which provides CMU’s program on site at five colleges in the province (Durham, Humber, George Brown, Georgian, and Mohawk).
Ms. Raikou has supported curriculum development and revision both locally and provincially since starting her career in post-secondary education at Georgian College in 2010. Her master’s research focused on applying learning outcomes for co-curricular activities to the quality assurance benchmarks of the College Quality Assurance Audit Process audit process.
Heather holds an honour’s bachelor of science degree from University of Toronto, with a double major in Exceptionality in Human Learning and Psychology and a minor in English.
As co-investigator on an Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer funded research project, Heather helped develop a qualitative protocol for mapping transfer between diplomas and degrees which was presented at the ONCAT Student Pathways in Higher Education Conference in 2016, and which has been adopted institution-wide at Georgian.
In her current role as Academic Quality Officer, Ms. Raikou provides resources and tool development support to curriculum mapping process, and writes research reports that support evidence based decision making at the college.
In previous roles, she was involved in the academic quality assurance processes of the college that included preparation of degree applications, organizing Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board site visits and facilitating degree renewals. She also provided administrative and organizational support to the Heads of Health Sciences Pre-Health Sciences project (2011-2013), which led to the development of the new program standard for the Pre-Health Sciences programs in Ontario.
Another award nominee, Norma Williams, was recognized at the conference for her capstone Youth with Autism Transitioning from High School to Post-Secondary Settings: Perceptions of Parents in Ontario.
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