Designing Meaningful Institutional Assessment Plans: Putting It All Together
Institutions with regional accreditation now have access to a great deal of information about developing assessment plans and many fine examples of general education assessments, academic department assessment plans, and a plethora of student affairs and student support assessment plans. But many institutions are lacking in the overall institutional level...
Reconceptualizing the Peer Review Process for Online Courses
Over the past two decades, academic deans, directors, and faculty have struggled to develop an effective peer review process for online courses. Most institutional review processes begin and end with the Quality Matters (QM) standard, the most widely accepted quality standard in the field of online education. But while QM...
Educating Students: The Moral Judgment Challenge for Higher Education
In Our Underachieving Colleges (2006), Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, challenged higher education institutions to do more in providing an education more supportive of building character in undergraduates. While the number of ethics courses offered has increased, both in professional schools and in undergraduate institutions, many of these courses...
When Faculty Overreact to Course Ratings
So far in this series on end-of-course ratings we have discussed how to frame a conversation with a faculty member who receives average ratings semester after semester and how to have a productive conversation with faculty who receives low evaluations. The final end-of-course ratings conversation that merits consideration is the exchange that...
Checklists As an Academic Leadership Tool
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on July 31, 2015. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. There are probably few tools we can use in academic leadership that seem less interesting than a checklist. We may sometimes even refer to checklists as though they were akin to sleepwalking our way through our...
Restructuring Academic Programs into Larger Divisions
Since 2013, economists and financial strategists have insisted that higher education must reduce its costs. In fact, the Moody’s perception of mounting fiscal pressure on all key university revenue sources led to the 2013 downgrade of the credit rating for the entire sector (Moody’s, 2013). But even before the 2008-09...
How to Lead Assessment in Your Unit
Being in charge of assessment within one’s unit involves more than measuring student learning outcomes. It’s about leading cultural change, a process that is best undertaken in collaboration with those who know the discipline, program, and students best—the faculty and staff. In an interview with Academic Leader, Linda Neavel Dickens,...
Why All Evaluations Are Not Alike
Imagine that one day you come into the office and a fellow administrator asks you to review the following language from the draft of an evaluation that he or she is writing about a faculty member.
Can a Capstone Course Try to Accomplish Too Much?
Kristi Upson-Saia thinks it can, and she has data from one field that supports her belief. When her religious studies department (at Occidental College) decided to reassess its capstone course, Upson-Saia looked for relevant publications in her field. Finding few, she began collecting data from other religious studies departments. She...
How to Avoid Common Assessment-Reporting Pitfalls
Little things can make or break a large project, so it would be a shame if ill-prepared reports undid all the hard work you put into an assessment effort. John H. Schuh, author of Assessment Methods for Student Affairs, offers tips for getting your assessment results into the right hands...
