ESPOL’s journey started in 2007, and reached its first objective in 2012 when two programs were ABET accredited, and since then has taken good pace with 13 (68% of total) accredited programs by the end of 2020. ESPOL is the only public university in Ecuador that keeps ABET accreditation and ranks second among South American universities by number of accredited programs. At the beginning, ESPOL adopted ABET accreditation as the educational model (EM), but years after realized that an original and self-developed EM was needed. This led us to design by 2021 our own EM, which includes accreditation as the keystone for quality assurance; however, the EM allows other non-engineering programs to work with different accreditation agencies (four in total), as well as to adapt to local needs of students and the labor professional market. Our EM is student-centered and competence-based, for which we had to align our competences definitions with our educational objectives and ABET’s student outcomes.
