Many people often view assessment as a laborious burden, something that serves no good other purpose than accreditation obligations. Building a culture of assessment can help faculty see its value for continuous improvement and encourage ...
With the growing emphasis on service-learning and the heightened necessity for experience on a resume, the ability to validate a student’s participation in cocurricular experiences has become absolutely necessary. Over the past 40 years, colleges ...
Faculty often associate assessment with collecting data to produce reports for accreditors. This is certainly one purpose of assessment, but it’s neither the only purpose nor the most important. When done well, assessment benefits faculty ...
Faculty learning communities (FLCs) can be useful in addressing a wide variety of faculty development needs. The California State University System uses FLCs to address systemwide priorities, such as faculty leadership development, use of innovative ...
Assessing faculty who design and teach online courses is a complex and often confusing process for department chairs and deans. Yet with the growing number of courses taught online, it is a timely topic. We ...
Most seasoned academics will acknowledge that being a department chair is challenging and often difficult. The individual filling this role is essentially squeezed between two groups with differing worldviews and missions. On one hand, the ...
It is time for academic leaders to start bringing some balance into the age of accountability. The truth is that teaching and learning are far more dynamic than simply checking boxes on the way from ...
Market forces such as student and parent concerns about employability, students’ need for flexibility, and decreasing traditional-age enrollments in New England are causing Colby-Sawyer College to rethink its approach to liberal arts education.
Reviewing and updating some of her previous writings, Diane Halpern suggests the list of factors important in program assessment have not changed but merit regular review. Here’s a summary of those seven factors drawn from ...
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, ...