Louisiana Delta Community College doubles student survey response rates with Watermark

Conducting pencil and paper course and faculty evaluations at the end of instructional terms somewhat worked prior to the COVID transformation. Maintaining faculty qualifications (training accomplishments and enhanced qualifications) in HR employee files worked somewhat, but proved almost impossible to update in real time. Compiling accreditation reports external to shared platforms sort of worked. Conducting faculty peer review procedures for promotion in rank with disjointed input feeds was tedious and prone to lost content. Now everything lives in the same Watermark suite of products.

Adopting the Watermark suite of products is like switching from analog to digital. The Canvas LMS integration of Course Evaluations & Surveys (CES) now allows all our students, distant or near, to provide valuable feedback regarding their educational experience. We can now capture an entire year of feedback from students and funnel that data into our annual evaluation process and subsequent faculty rank and promotion reviews. Faculty now maintain their accomplishments and enhanced qualifications in real time using Faculty Success (FS), which proves invaluable when compiling faculty qualification rosters for accreditation reports. The shared team effort when compiling evidence and drafting narratives for accreditation purposes is dramatically improved using Planning & Self Study (PSS). The suite of products we use work for us, which means our people work less on capturing tedious and manual after-action reporting.  Now we operate in the now where our efforts are current and our products are archived for those who will support the college’s mission after we leave.

Our end-of-course student survey response rates consistently hover around 50%.  Before CES we were lucky to experience 25% feedback.

The amount of time it takes to produce faculty qualification rosters is significantly reduced when compared to manual compilation of information. 

Another measurable improvement is the ease by which we can share draft and completed self-study reports with reviewers both inside and outside our institution. Long gone are the days of emailing multiple compressed folders via email.

When we first implemented CES, our team was relatively new to LMS integration of 3rd party products. The Watermark support team walked us through the process, connected our team with their team, and we have never looked back. 

The same experience is true of our more recent implementation of the PSS and FS platforms. The product implementation teams were professional, detailed, timely, and responsive to our needs. 

Even now, when we need help or just want to ask “can we do this?”, our support team members are always willing to jump on a call to assist. I can’t be more pleased with the initial and continued support associated with these digital solutions.

The ways we use Watermark products gives everyone at our college a voice which contributes to the success of our institutional mission. Student voices are heard, reviewed, analyzed, and their feedback assimilated into our strategic planning goals. Faculty accomplishments and efforts are chronicled, analyzed, and celebrated. Our recent institutional accreditation reaffirmation cycle yielded a compliance report consisting of over 1,000 pieces of evidence and written by over 40 contributors. Evidence that came from across the Watermark suite was fixed into a single report and then shared with external peer reviewers who knew nothing of our story. Now they know and we are proud to tell it.