Announcing the CLO / PO Evaluation, Assessment and Continuous Improvement Project !!!

The goal of this project is to make evaluation more efficient so that faculty can focus on assessment and continuous improvement enable research on evaluation methods enable research on improving the quality of assessment and continuous improvement make Kettering a recognized leader in evaluation based assessment and assessment based continuous improvement establish a project team to write a proposal seeking between $150K and $350K

Key Announcement Informational Meeting and Software Demonstration- was held on Friday January 23, 2009 10 people from at least 7 different departments attended. As a result A White Paper will be developed and available by the end of 4th week to more fully describe the proposal A rough draft of a booklet describing the prototype evaluation, assessment and continuous improvement process will be available by the end of 4th week. Individual Presentations to Departments are Possible

The key goals of this project are

• to minimize time required by faculty to evaluate, assess, and continuously improve our courses and programs
• to increase the quality of evaluation, assessment, and continuous improvement
• to better enable faculty to contribute to research based pedagogical innovation
• to make Kettering University a recognized leader in evaluation, assessment, and continuous improvement

An evaluation based assessment system (which is based on discussions within the IME Department with Srinivas Chakravarthy, Tony Lin, Mark Palmer and Matt Sanders - contributing, although not completely endorsing) was presented and discussed.

• This is based on a series of rubrics which combine student performance based on standards established by the instructor and student feedback ratings at the course level.
• At the program outcome level a series of rubrics combine the course level ratings and the combined results of three different end-of-program performance measures

This is enabled by a software packaged authored by Mark Palmer, which does the following

• The course instructor will enter graded performance data, student survey data and their own notes into the Course Evaluation Workbook.
• Once Completed the Workbook will automatically create the Course Assessment Report (which contains three sections - Evaluation, Assessment, and Action Plan) with the Evaluation Section filled out. The Workbook will also automatically create four appendices to help the faculty member write the Assessment and Action Plan.
• Once the Course Assessment Report is completed, the faculty member will open the Generic Course Action Report and it will automatically read all pertinent information from the course assessment report. This will allow the faculty member to simply record their progress throughout the following term. At the end of the following term, the results of the action can be automatically exported to the appendices thus making the writing of the Assessment Report is easier.
• One person in the department will enter in the end-of program data, in our case an attribute survey, EBI and design project - but these can be modified into the Program Outcome Evaluation Workbook. Then a macro pulls in all data from the Course Assessment Reports turned in by faculty and writes the evaluation section of the each individual program outcome assessment report, and the appendices (4) for each program outcome.

Hopefully this will generate a lot of discussion and we can set up a team or teams to work on implementation and securing funding.