Although the posting of the assessment coordinator’s position did not occur until February 2002, the individual hired for the position was not available until May 13 and assumed her duties on Tuesday, May 14, 2002. LCO College’s Commencement occurred that Friday, on May 17th with faculty obligations completed that day. For this reason, it was not possible to meet with individual faculty during the days of final exams.
With very few faculty members on campus during the summer when this Monitoring Report was being written, the new assessment coordinator has only been able to sample evidence of assessment plan implementation through a faculty survey and interviews. In speaking informally with individual faculty members, some have indicated they have collected assessment data at the course level but without a coordinator, they were uncertain about what to do with this data. There is evidence that some divisions have discussed assessment and made suggestions for the improvement of the 1999 Plan. The new assessment coordinator will continue to collect information and data from faculty as they drop in over the summer. However, comprehensive evaluation of the assessment plan implementation and further plan implementation will need to wait for the fall semester when all faculty are on campus.
Univers, the administrative database software system in use
at the College, is not known to be user-friendly. An add-on module that runs in
DOS, ReportWriter, is capable of custom reporting, but is cumbersome for most to
use effectively. Most staff offices that use ReportWriter use it to generate
reports for their uses when the “canned reports” do not perform those tasks
adequately. For this reason, there has not been much in the way of data for
analysis and utilization beyond the routine reports needed internally in staff
areas.
With the College network upgrade to Windows 2000, there is
an anticipated upgrade in Univers, and with this, ReportWriter may no longer be
available. ODBC (Open Data Base Capture) is available at additional cost and
licensing with the Univers upgrade. ODBC is capable of extracting raw data
directly from the database in seamlessly importing the data into desktop
programs such as Microsoft Excel and Access. An experienced user of Univers ODBC
and ReportWriter, the assessment coordinator has the capacity to do data
analysis through these venues for assessment purposes. Several studies on
retention have already been completed.
One of the findings encountered by the new assessment
coordinator is the previous lack of a central Office of Assessment. Even if the
1999 Plan were fully implemented, without a central location for information and
findings, it is difficult to document the successes and near misses of
assessment initiatives. The lack of a central repository becomes even more
critical with administrative and faculty turnover, as has been the case since
1999.
With the hiring of an assessment coordinator, the College has recognized the need to centralize and coordinate the assessment program. By allocating resources to establish a central office, the College has begun to address in a concerted way, the necessity of establishing and maintaining the physical space and human resources for the systematic assessment of student learning.