Declining enrollment rates and questions about the necessity of higher ed demonstrate a clear need for continuous improvement, which is a vital concept in industries like business, healthcare, and technology. Higher education institutions need to direct their attention to continuous improvement to avoid falling behind.
Given today's rapid pace of change, though, your assessment requirements can change seemingly overnight. Your institution needs to be able to evolve to continue providing value to students, but you also need to retain existing data for future reference in order to achieve the best results.
That's where implementing continuous improvement practices comes in. The right tech tools can help you maintain adaptability and momentum even in this chaotic environment.
Continuous improvement: What's the point?
The main goal of continuous improvement goes beyond assessing student data. It requires you to use the insights you extract from that data to develop an action plan for student improvement.
Depending on your findings, your action plan could mean many different things:
- Reviewing curriculum requirements and adjusting to include new key assignments that align with different standards
- Hiring new faculty to teach different classes or represent greater diversity
- Removing outdated courses from a program and replacing them with ones more relevant to the field or industry
- Creating new pathways for personalized learning plans
- Investing in new educational tools to facilitate online learning
- Opening up new opportunities for experiential learning
Whatever your needs, improvements are going to happen — and they should continue to happen throughout an institution's lifetime. That's why it's called continuous improvement.
The importance of closing the assessment loop
Most of you are probably familiar with the phrase “closing the loop.” It refers to the final step in the continuous improvement process when institutions or programs implement the data-informed solutions they came up with to address their current weaknesses.
The process generally includes four steps:
- Identifying outcomes: All involved stakeholders clearly define what learning objectives to improve. As the driving force behind the student experience, these outcomes should be realistic and relevant to your institution's mission.
- Gathering evidence: Faculty and assessment professionals will use a series of evaluations to measure your selected outcomes. Common metrics for measurement include graduation rates, student retention rates, passing rates for licensure exams, and student engagement.
- Analyzing data: Stakeholders will extract actionable insights from the assessment data and identify important trends. Using intuitive assessment software helps you convey the whole story of your data with interactive dashboards and helpful visualization.
- Creating and implementing solutions: Finish the cycle by putting your solutions into action. This step is critical for achieving the outcomes you defined at the start. While implementation may necessitate a lot of trial and error, it can help you on your path to success.
This model, known as the Assessment Learning Cycle, is a long-accepted standard in higher education that's consistent across all programs and fields of study. Intuitive, comprehensive assessment solutions are beneficial tools for maximizing your efforts at every stage in the cycle.
Additionally, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and transparency is vital for this process because it facilitates closer collaboration between all levels of your institution.
Using learning achievement tools to retain historical data
Continuous improvement requires a lot of trial and error, which means your institution will see a lot of updates and changes. Even when implementing these changes, retaining evidence of your data and findings can help you compare and contrast your results so you can keep a record of change progression.
Retaining and preserving historical data is essential. Fortunately, there are software tools your institution can use for this task.
In the Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) solution, you can create assignments for students to complete — examples can include anything from key assessments, reflective essays, or any other type of assignment being collected for assessment purposes.
When you make changes to your course or program, you may need to update your course requirements to match. For example, if you stop collecting a key assignment from students, you have the ability to hide it from new students.
Retiring a requirement allows you to collect new data from your new requirement without deleting any previously collected data from the old one. And while you can access this data at any time, your students will be unable to submit anything to your retired requirements.
LAT includes features to help administrators save time while formatting directions, such as:
- Rich text editors.
- Easy image uploads.
- Table functions to control the page layout.
- Personalization options to embed media or resize and move images.
LAT also offers capabilities to publish rubrics externally that provide access to current and prospective students, as well as teams outside your organization.
Using Outcomes Assessment Projects for data-driven improvement
Watermark Outcomes Assessment Projects is a unified solution that enables higher education institutions to manage assessment projects at scale. By pulling together data from a wide variety of sources, the platform creates a consolidated, accessible hub for storing and analyzing the information you need.
We designed this platform around continuous improvement so you can fully commit to achieving your intended outcomes. Some of the potential benefits of implementing Outcomes Assessment Projects at your institution include:
- Streamlined data collection: With the freedom to edit your published projects and assignments directly within the platform, Outcomes Assessment Projects makes it possible to adapt your data collection strategies as needed.
- Accelerated reporting: Automated processes generate more complete reports faster, providing a longer timeframe for analyzing and implementing assessment feedback.
- Improved organization: The solution's intuitive dashboard provides a centralized location for all your assessment data, so you can quickly access what you need when you need it.
- Greater flexibility: You can choose an existing rubric template or design your own tailored to the specific outcomes you're focusing on.
These features and more can help your institution extract more from your data, so you can design more meaningful assessments. And more meaningful assessments allow you to maintain high student engagement while working toward your overall goals.
Maximize your assessment data with Watermark
Whether your aim is to showcase your institution's progress or achieve accreditation, your continuous improvement initiative depends on your ability to tell the complete assessment story. Watermark's fully integrated software solutions for higher education institutions empower you to rapidly transform your data into powerful insights.
The right tools will help you make real changes in your institution without losing any of your assessment story along the way. Request a live demo today to see how our solutions can help your institution use all your historical and current assessment data.
