College of DuPage Chooses Watermark to More Effectively Manage Faculty Reviews, Activities & Course Evaluations

NEW YORK— March 3, 2020 –Watermark, the largest provider of educational intelligence solutions for higher ed worldwide, is pleased to welcome College of DuPage as it’s newest partner. Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, the College of DuPage (COD) has elected to use Watermark’s faculty activity reporting solution in order to more effectively manage processes for faculty hiring, evaluation and reviews, as well as professional development and support.

As a public community college in Illinois with more than 1,400 adjunct faculty, the College was intent on increasing efficiencies in its faculty activity documenting and reporting, as well as evaluations, reviews, and promotion and tenure processes. Prior to selecting technology to support their processes, COD manually maintained faculty information in a variety of systems. The College will implement Watermark across campus to centralize information, enable expanded data collection abilities, and streamline processes — with a goal of evaluating all adjunct faculty every three years and better supporting faculty in their professional development.

With a focus on improving the quality of its programs, effectiveness of curriculum, faculty review processes, as well as accreditation reporting, the College has also chosen to implement Watermark’s enterprise course evaluation and institutional survey solution. With Watermark, COD is streamlining the process of capturing student feedback across the institution at different points in time by centralizing and automating information-rich reporting to ensure both faculty and administrators have the actionable data needed to monitor quality and make real-time decisions that improve teaching and learning.

Specifically, in leveraging Watermark’s enterprise course evaluation solution campus wide, the College is now able to:

1. Administer course evaluations across all academic units in accordance with the specific dates at multiple time points throughout the year.
2. Provide reports of course evaluation data in multiple formats for various stakeholders.
3. Access the raw data as well as expand its dataset through complete integration with its other campus systems, including its Learning Management System.
4. Integrate course evaluation data with other data in Watermark’s faculty activity reporting solution.

In choosing Watermark, the College sought tools that enabled workflows and processes that supported more accurate and expanded data collection capabilities, including that of faculty activity data. With the goal of facilitating an integrated faculty data collection and reporting process, COD is demonstrating a commitment to supporting faculty growth through a process that allows for the documenting, collecting, and storing of faculty activities, including research and publications, professional development, internal and external service, course load, and student course evaluations. Faculty can store artifacts of their work, such as full-text files of publications, presentations, grant award letters, and audio and video recordings of performances, and then generate Curriculum Vitae from the data entered.

Plus, when faculty upload this vita data into Watermark, the College can produce activity reports for the purposes of annual departmental and College-wide review and celebrations of faculty accomplishments. Data is easily accessed for promotion and tenure discussions, accreditation requirements, and reports to internal or external constituents.

With Watermark solutions, COD can now leverage an integration between its course evaluation and faculty activity data sets, extending 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.

“We’re excited to welcome the College of DuPage and support their faculty activity reporting and course evaluation needs. Consolidating and expanding the College’s faculty dataset marks an important step in helping the College centralize many of its core institutional processes and increase efficiency. At Watermark, we look to ease these institutional data collection processes so that faculty and administrators can focus more on using their data to make meaningful improvements across all levels of the institution — that means for teaching and learning as well as faculty professional development,” said Kevin Michielsen, Watermark’s CEO.

Contact:
Victoria Guzzo
Sr. Director, Corporate Communications
vguzzo@watermarkinsights.com