NEW YORK— August 25, 2020– Watermark, a pioneer in educational intelligence, is pleased to expand its partnership with Central Michigan University, located in Mount Pleasant, MI. Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, CMU has selected Watermark’s educational intelligence solutions for campus-wide academic and non-academic planning and assessment, accreditation management, student ePortfolios, course evaluation, faculty activity reporting, and curriculum, academic catalog and syllabus management needs.
Focused on increasing student success and using data to drive meaningful improvements, Central Michigan University is implementing Watermark to increase efficiencies and integrate institutional effectiveness processes across campus, including assessment planning, program review, learning outcomes assessment, and accreditation reporting. Central Michigan plans to leverage Watermark to reduce redundancy and time spent on manual processes, as well as provide longitudinal transparency around plans, goals, outcomes, and results.
“We’re choosing to expand our partnership with Watermark because their solutions are mission critical for us. We’ll be able to better integrate our planning, assessment, and accreditation processes and centralize data collection for all of these processes — streamlining our core institutional processes so we continue to have the educational intelligence needed to make informed decisions that improve student and institutional outcomes. It’s helpful to have a technology partner that shares our vision and recognizes its value,” said Dr. Mary Schutten, Executive Vice President & Provost at Central Michigan University.
With Watermark’s ability to streamline assessment data collection, scoring, and reporting, administrators will be able to gather results and interpret data on learning outcomes achievement at both the programmatic and university levels. Watermark Planning & Self-Study is built on the new Watermark Platform, which features a powerful data architecture that allows an institution to leverage its data from external sources and across the platform. This educational intelligence platform combines many of today’s traditional point solutions to streamline processes, break down data silos, and empower administrators, faculty, and students to make evidence-based decisions that improve performance.
In addition to leveraging its innovative architectural foundation, Planning & Self-Study offers CMU capabilities that cannot be found in other solutions, including:
CMU can track where and how outcomes are being assessed, pinpoint gaps in curriculum, and identify and monitor the effectiveness of improvement actions — all while being able to generate HLC accreditation reports from this work within a single, centralized system.
Plus, with Watermark’s course evaluation, faculty activity reporting, and curriculum, catalog and syllabus management solutions, CMU demonstrates a commitment to improving the quality of its programs, effectiveness of curriculum at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and faculty review processes.
A priority for CMU continues to be capturing student feedback across the institution at different points in time for purposes of better understanding the student experience. CMU will be able to centralize and automate information-rich reporting that ensures both faculty and administrators have the actionable data needed to monitor quality and make real-time decisions that improve teaching and learning.
The University also sought to enable workflows and processes that supported more accurate and expanded faculty activity data collection capabilities, allowing for the documenting, collecting, and storing of faculty activities, including research and publications, professional development, internal and external service, course load, and integrated student course evaluations. CMU will produce activity reports for the purposes of annual departmental and University-wide review and celebrations of faculty accomplishments.
With Watermark, CMU can leverage the integration between course evaluation and faculty activity data sets to extend the life cycle of its data, which will prove valuable in gaining a more holistic picture of course and program effectiveness, faculty workload, approaches to teaching and learning, and service across the institution for purposes of evaluation and continuous quality improvement.
Finally, CMU will use Watermark’s integrated curriculum, academic catalog, and syllabus management solution to:
“As Central Michigan University’s partner, we’re committed to supporting all of their student learning and institutional goals and helping them meet the challenges of effectively using data to improve outcomes. We want our technology to ease their core processes so they have better, actionable data to monitor quality and make real-time decisions that improve teaching and learning across all levels of the institution,” said Matt Bartel, Watermark’s Chief Product Officer.
Founded in 1892, CMU has more than 16,000 students on its Mount Pleasant campus and over 8,000 enrolled online and at more than 30 locations across North America. More than 20 percent of CMU’s main campus students supplement their on-campus classes with online courses. Among just five percent of U.S. universities in the highest two Carnegie research classifications, CMU offers approximately 300 academic programs at the undergraduate, master’s, specialist and doctoral levels.
