AUSTIN, TX— November 30, 2020–Watermark, the largest provider of educational intelligence solutions for higher ed worldwide, is pleased to welcome one of its newest partners, the College of Education & Human Development at Texas A&M University, located in College Station, Texas. Texas A&M’s College of Education and Human Development has selected the company’s latest planning and accreditation solution — Watermark Planning & Self-Study — to support its assessment planning, integrated program review, accreditation reporting, and ongoing improvement efforts.
Focused on using data to drive meaningful improvements, the College adopted Planning & Self-Study specifically because of its ability to increase efficiencies and create a more holistic integration of program effectiveness processes, including assessment planning, program review, learning outcomes assessment, and accreditation reporting. With Watermark, the College can more easily collect and report on assessment planning efforts across units to meet goals for continuous improvement and accreditation.
“Watermark Planning & Self-Study meets us where we are, mirrors the way we view assessment, has the dashboarding and reporting we wanted, and is flexible enough to align to our processes as we grow. We’ll be able to streamline our assessment planning and answer essential questions about the success of our program and course offerings, which for us is mission critical at this time. This is an opportunity to increase faculty and program chair engagement as well as transparency around our goals, measurements, and results – all of which is helping to drive more meaningful improvements across our college while preparing for accreditation,” said Dr. Beverly Irby, Professor and Associate Dean of Academics Affairs.
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 point systems to streamline processes, break down data silos, and empower administrators, faculty, and students to make evidence-based decisions to improve performance. In addition to leveraging its innovative architectural foundation, Planning & Self-Study offers the College capabilities that cannot be found in other solutions, including:
With the ability to review assessment findings for specific courses, aggregate by outcome or measure, or roll up assessment data from across multiple course sections to stack against a benchmark, Planning & Self-Study can help the CEHD more easily pinpoint gaps in curriculum, identify and monitor the effectiveness of improvement actions, and more easily generate accreditation reports — all from within a single, centralized system.
“We’re excited to partner with Texas A&M University’s College of Education. With Planning & Self-Study, we look to support the College in fostering a positive culture of assessment without having to change its processes to accommodate the technology. With our solution and the educational intelligence platform upon which it’s built, we’re tackling core issues around data integration with other systems and supporting greater reporting and analytics so that our partners have better-connected data and the kind of insights needed to improve outcomes across all levels,” said Erin Shy, Watermark’s Chief Executive Officer.
Texas A&M opened its doors in 1876 as the state’s first public institution of higher learning, and the College of Education and Human Development is ranked among the top schools for graduate programs in education, according to the 2020 U.S. News and World Report.