Managing assessment and accreditation can be a daunting task, requiring involvement from multiple stakeholders across campus, coordinated review processes, and specific requirements that must be met. If collaboration has become too complicated and you’re missing key data points, strategic planning software for higher education can help.
Watermark Planning & Self-Study not only helps you streamline data collection, but helps you get more from the content captured in the system. By using a single solution created exclusively for higher education, you save time and avoid duplicate work. Our solution makes it simple to accomplish these critical tasks.
Watermark Planning & Self-Study can be configured to align with your organizational structure, making it easy to involve academic leadership at all levels of the institution. Stakeholders know exactly what’s required of them, and it’s simple to enter relevant information in the system. Program chairs can easily document and revise important information like mission statements, and define learning and success outcomes.
After aligning learning and success outcomes within a defined program, they can be mapped to courses and outcomes at the school level in just a few clicks. The system also allows you to list all required courses within the system and specify at what level concepts will be addressed within each course: introduced, reinforced, or mastered.
Engaging faculty and adjuncts can often be challenging, but Planning & Self-Study makes it easy for them to enter results. You can send an email to instructors, upload results, manually enter raw numbers and scores, or use LMS integration to pull data into the system. To close the loop, users can enter aligned results for each program within the system. Results can be gathered throughout the assessment cycle, and it’s easy to see whether goals are being met and enter action items if follow-up is needed.
The Office of Institutional Effectiveness often needs to take a birds-eye view and assess results across programs. The annual academic plan is easily accessible within Planning & Self-Study. All active programs are visible within the plan, and it’s easy to see current progress at a glance. And by mapping institutional learning outcomes to each program, you can quickly determine how each program is contributing to overarching goals. Each step of the process is clearly defined so you can easily see outstanding tasks, gather feedback, and write narratives in alignment with institutional timelines.
For a closer look at these essential features, check out our 30-minute Watermark Solution Tour: Planning & Self-Study.
