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Greetings!
E pluribus unum: out of many, one
This month's newsletter notes the arrival of the Department of Education's Education Dashboard and the Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile. The Dashboard offers a set of indicators of progress toward the national goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. The Profile document describes "what students should be expected to know and be able to do once they earn their degrees." Both these efforts are attempts to promote viewing higher education in some systematic way and acting accordingly.
Higher education in the United States is distinctive in the autonomy and diversity of its institutions. This diversity and autonomy of colleges and universities, including programmatic discretion and academic freedom for individuals, is rightly cited as one of the distinguishing features and strengths of higher education in the U. S. However, as the Dashboard and Profile suggest, professional autonomy has not been coupled with efforts to clarify and assess the results we want to achieve in terms of degrees and learning and how well we are doing.
We at the Alliance welcome these and similar efforts to add some "unum" to the "pluribus" of higher education in the U. S. On our part, the Presidents' Alliance, the institutional certification program, and the soon to be released publication, Institutional Guidelines for Gathering and Reporting of Evidence and Using it to Improve Outcomes, all aim at getting institutions to focus on certain common standards and activities for gathering, reporting, and using evidence.
Promoting such standards is not standardization. Rather it suggests that professional autonomy goes hand in hand with professional responsibilities to our students and society. Those responsibilities include seeing our efforts, at whatever level, as participating in some larger framework of higher education in the United States. The current and future initiatives of the Alliance are designed to contribute to such a framework through voluntary professional efforts to promote gathering, reporting, and using evidence to improve student learning.
Sincerely,
David C. Paris, Executive Director
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PRESIDENTS' ALLIANCE SPOTLIGHT: NORTHLAND COMMUNITY AND TECHNICAL COLLEGE
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Each edition of the Alliance's newsletter will now feature a spotlight on a member of the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability. This institutional spotlight series will provide readers with more information on the work faculty and staff at Presidents' Alliance member institutions are doing to improve the assessment of student learning on their campuses.
Our first institutional spotlight features Northland Community and Technical College (NCTC), a multi-campus institution within the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. As an institution, Chief Academic Officer Kent Hanson shares that NCTC joined the Presidents' Alliance because of the importance of being part of the broader conversation regarding assessment in higher education. The NCTC community continues to work toward improving assessment practices regarding student learning at both the institutional and individual academic program levels. This work is multi-faceted and driven by an evolving campus assessment committee that consists of administrators and faculty, from technical and liberal arts disciplines, who have a keen interest in assessment.
Current and future initiatives regarding the design of outcomes and reporting of assessment data are underway at NCTC. The institution is currently engaged in developing and refining their institutional learner outcomes, which are embedded within five domains: foundation skills, thinking, global and civic responsibility, applied and information technology, and personal development. In the development of their institutional learner outcomes, campus leadership are working to ensure that their outcomes are both specific and measureable in order to truly capture the learning that occurs among their students.
Data reporting is a central part of assessment at NCTC. In order to facilitate the reporting of assessment data at the program level, faculty submit assessment reports electronically using the Desire2Learn, a learning management system. The use of a learning platform typically used for courses allows NCTC to better facilitate the process of providing faculty with feedback to further improve their program assessments-a critical piece of the assessment loop on their campus. Hanson and Beth McMahon, chair of the Assessment Committee, note that NCTC is fairly unique in that they are using Desire2Learn in this way. Using the web-based platform not only eases assessment reporting at NCTC, but it also prompts discussions regarding assessment among faculty.
To learn more about the current and future assessment initiatives at NCTC, visit its President's Alliance institutional profile.
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UNITED STATES EDUCATION DASHBOARD
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To monitor the Country's progress towards reaching its goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, the U.S. Department of Education launched the United States Education Dashboard. The U.S. Department of Education anticipates that the Dashboard will initiate and inform discussion about the improvement of educational results with its select indicators for how well the education community is progressing on educational outcomes at national and state levels.
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DEGREE QUALIFICATIONS PROFILE
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The Lumina Foundation recently launched its Degree Qualifications Profile publication. This document is a framework consisting of set reference points for what college students should learn at the undergraduate and master's level of education.
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NEW MEMBERS OF THE PRESIDENTS' ALLIANCE
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California State University-Fresno and Middlesex Community College are the newest editions to the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability. We invite you to learn more about what these institutions are doing to improve the assessment of student learning by visiting their profiles on the Alliance's website.
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ON THE ROAD
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Will you be at the ACPA: College Student Educators International Annual Convention, March 26-30, 2011? Join us as we present "Moving the Higher Education Community Towards Gathering, Reporting on and Using Evidence to Improve Student Learning" on Monday, March 28, 2011 at 12:00pm in the Baltimore Convention Center, Room 321.
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SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK
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We'd like to know what you think about the Alliance and our newsletter.
Please send your comments to office@newleadershipalliance.org.
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