Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

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Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

8/30/2006

By Matt Villano

Leaning on Vendors

The assessment systems at UC-Davis and WWU are a homegrown spin on a commercial product; other schools have relied more heavily on vendors for help. For instance, Flagler College administrators, long-time customers of Jenzabar, use Jenzabar EX, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that collects institutional assessment data from a variety of sources. The system, which is entirely softwarebased, automates much of the reporting that school officials previously pulled together in a manual fashion. As a result, CIO Joseph Provenza says the school has saved big bucks (not to mention huge amounts of time) on gathering business intelligence.

At Texas A&M, a homegrown database
(costing about as much annually as a data
analyst plus server capacity) helps
administrators get a solid grasp on faculty
productivity and a head start on planning.

Once the school uses its Jenzabar system to compile in-house data on areas such as student retention, financial aid, faculty/student ratios, and faculty benefits, it compares this information to data about peer institutions from the National Center for Education Statistics (see “The Heart of It All”). Randi Hagen, director of institutional research, effectiveness, and planning, says that on top of this, the school utilizes a number of user-friendly electronic assessment products from the Educational Testing Service to tackle student performance assessment. Using a SharePoint Portal Server from Microsoft, Flagler distributes results from these tests via the campus intranet.

“In the past, only a select group of people on campus could see the limited institutional data we collected,” says Hagen, who notes that the school will deploy Jenzabar’s new Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution (JICS) later this year to “webify” the entire process from beginning to end. “Today, not only have we increased our data exponentially, but as long as you have a computer and a faculty or staff account, you can see it all.”

Challenges Ahead

While these schools have embraced innovative technology to facilitate institutional assessment, the new approaches are not without their challenges. First is the issue of cultural change. In days past, university assessment departments were able to cull performance data from paperwork that faculty members filed at the beginning and end of every semester. With some of the new technologies, institutions require faculty members to report data more consistently. Not only do the new demands force faculty members to spend more time submitting data, but these users also must familiarize themselves with a new interface, which takes time.

Some schools have tried to tackle this learning curve by implementing professional development classes to help staff and faculty members get to know the new technology. Others, such as Texas A&M, have tried to deploy intuitive interfaces to make using assessment systems as user-friendly as possible. In many cases, efforts like these have yielded good results. Still, Burdt at Eduventures says that some of the more sophisticated institutional assessment technologies have wreaked havoc on schools with large departments or departments with faculty members who insist on blazing their own trails. “It’s a tricky cultural shift,” she says. “As funding becomes tighter, schools are maneuvered into a position of having to prove that assessment technologies are effective, and everyone must comply.”