Hear from your peer Krista

I started with the institution almost three years ago. When we arrived at the institution, there were manual systems for pulling together assessments. We’re all wonderful people doing manual work. But as we start to ramp up enrollment and programming, manual systems are very challenging to work with. We needed to find a system that would allow us to be able to mainstream, interface with accreditation, and assist us with managing the faculty.

The primary reason was actually because of the multiple options within the suite and how they all interface with each other. We have had Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys for years, and once I realized what that was, I said, “Okay, let’s look at that company to see what else.” Instead of introducing all new systems, what do we already have, and how can we utilize that? There were a couple of others we looked at. But I was amazed by how the interfaces of Watermark worked together, all the different options, with the Insights Hub at the middle — that is really what sold me. As I made proposals to stakeholders, it became very apparent that Watermark was going to meet the needs for not only our campus currently, but as we grew. I know there are a lot of really large institutions that use Watermark, and they’re able to scale accordingly. That was really attractive to us.

The first one was the management of our program reviews. We use Watermark Planning & Self-Study for that. Our primary target for using Planning & Self-Study was to manage the program review process, the templates, the data collection, the evidence, all in one place. The workflow system used out of that is perfect. It’s exactly what our institution needed in order to be able to manage the process in a systematic way. We also were looking at Watermark Faculty Success. We have the baseline, and it actually was perfect because it served the need for our faculty to use it for reviews and the workflow. Again, I love the workflow feature. The workflow feature in Faculty Success was wonderful — for us to be able to go from person to person, without that constant emailing back and forth. It just automatically goes through. Set it up, and it just runs.

Watermark allows our faculty to be able to engage with assessment at a higher level than they were with our manual systems. There are reminders, there is a dashboard, there are ways that they’re interfacing with the data in real time that makes it more realistic for them. So it’s not just looking at a spreadsheet in some file. When they log in, it’s there. They’re interacting with it back and forth. There are reminders coming, there are workflows moving forward.

It’s the interaction with it that becomes part of our culture of assessment, and that’s really what we were striving for. That’s where Watermark was able to assist us. We want a culture of assessment in our institution, and you need a system that will help facilitate that without being burdensome to faculty. Watermark did that for us.

I’ve onboarded multiple systems at other institutions before, and the onboarding that Watermark does — customer support, implementation phases, the training — is amazing. I was absolutely thrilled with the process. All of them were very well versed in the product, and they were so client-focused. We were seen as the primary important component in the room. What our needs were, they searched out to find them. Very resourceful, very accessible, and that was wonderful.