FRCC Expands its Partnership with Watermark to Better Connect Student Feedback Data to Institutional Improvement Efforts

This content was written prior to the renaming of Watermark products in July 2021, and refers to an old product name. To learn more about the new names for Watermark products, read our press release here.

NEW YORK, NY— October 2, 2020 – Watermark, the largest provider of educational intelligence solutions for higher ed worldwide, is pleased to expand its partnership with Front Range Community College located in Westminster, Colorado. Accredited by The Higher Learning Commission, FRCC has expanded its use of Watermark’s enterprise course evaluation and institutional survey solution from online courses to use across campus, including multiple locations.

With their shift to full online teaching and learning, the College is expanding its course evaluations to cover all courses in order to more effectively surface valuable insights into the student experience. With a focus on improving the quality of its programs, monitoring the effectiveness of curriculum, as well as streamlining accreditation reporting, FRCC will use Watermark to better capture student feedback across all courses at different points in time.

By centralizing and automating information-rich reporting, both faculty and administrators will have the actionable data needed to monitor quality and make real-time decisions that improve teaching and learning. Specifically, the institution will be able to:

1. Administer course evaluations across all academic units in accordance with the specific dates at multiple time points throughout the year.
2. Build transparency by providing reports of course evaluation data in multiple formats for various stakeholders.
3. Access raw data as well as expand its datasets through complete integrations with other campus systems, including its Learning Management System (LMS), Brightspace’s D2L.

In addition, Front Range Community College will experience key benefits, including:

• Improvement of Evaluative Data: Moving all course evaluations to Watermark automates data collection and calculation, improving data quality and integrity with timely access for faculty and departments. The quality and consistency of data will also improve through the use of standardized questions, with the option to be aligned to learning outcomes, allowing for meaningful comparisons of data across courses and units.
• Consolidation of Processes and Better Integration: In addition to consolidating a variety of methods for aggregating and analyzing evaluative data, Watermark integrates with existing FRCC systems, which will allow the College to better leverage its ongoing technological investments. The College will be able to compare results over time and have the kind of information that will help inform planning, improve curriculum, and drive quality at all levels.

As the only course evaluation and survey solution designed for education and with proven capabilities to improve student response rates, EvaluationKIT by Watermark supports deep, turnkey integrations with all leading LMSs, allowing key institutional data to be imported to automate and streamline the survey process while supporting increased communication with students.

“We’re offering all of our fall courses online and looking to deploy course evaluations seamlessly to students across all of those courses and multiple locations. With Watermark, we’ll be able to simplify our College’s processes for capturing student feedback and better quality data, so that we can compare results from an instructor or course against specific grouped data, access longitudinal reporting to view results over time, and generate operational reporting to identify areas for improvement. We’ll have valuable insight into the student experience and access to the kind of information that will help inform planning, improve curriculum, and drive quality at all levels,” said Stephanie Wickman, Director of Learning & Design at FRCC.

“We’re honored to have the opportunity to expand our partnership with Front Range Community College and to support their efforts to better connect student feedback data to quality improvement efforts. We look forward to providing the institution with an increased level of student feedback and better insight into course effectiveness, so they can continue making curricular improvements,” said Matt Bartel, Watermark’s Chief Product Officer.

“Now more than ever, our goal is to ease these institutional data collection processes so that faculty and administrators can focus more on using their data to make meaningful improvements to teaching and learning,” noted Bartel.

Founded in 1968 and serving more than 20,000 students across multiple locations, Front Range Community College is the largest community college in Colorado and focused on student success. The College offers 29 programs that are guaranteed to transfer to public, four-year colleges and universities in Colorado, as well as more than 36 innovative career and technical programs to train students for immediate employment in more than three dozen high-demand fields. More than 20 of their certificate or Associate of Applied Science programs have state, regional, and/or national accreditation.

Contact:
Victoria Guzzo
Senior Director of Corporate Communications
vguzzo@watermarkinsights.com