Assessment and Accreditation Management Software for Higher Education
Foster campus collaboration and improvement
Planning & Self-Study unifies planning, assessment, and outcomes data in a single, integrated hub.
Award-Winning Software You Can Trust
A planning and accreditation software platform that meets you where you are
- Manage assessment planning from a place of understanding by easily organizing and managing your outcomes assessment with clarity and confidence year over year
- Support a versatile and collaborative self-study process by selecting and customizing your preferred report template and adding contributors to specific narratives
- Share your Strategic Plan with stakeholders across the institution to demonstrate alignment and fuel progress toward established strategic goals
- Create a collaborative workspace for program review with all the essential inputs in one place to evaluate program effectiveness and drive program progress
Planning & Self-Study offers a streamlined system for gathering, understanding, reflecting on, and acting on assessment and other programmatic data. Through turnkey integrations with other Watermark products and campus systems, you can eliminate redundant tasks, achieve stronger faculty engagement, and drive productive, action-oriented discussions about continuous improvement.
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What to Expect
Increase data transparency across your institution
Planning & Self-Study enables you to collect results, then analyze them at the level you need. Gain insights at every level, from course-level to institution-wide, and determine the actions to drive progress and student success. Interactive dashboards provide transparency into assessment planning and outcomes achievement, and shared templates align your entire campus around strategic goals.
Planning & Self-Study enables you to collect results, then analyze them at the level you need. Gain insights at every level, from course-level to institution-wide, and determine the actions to drive progress and student success. Interactive dashboards provide transparency into assessment planning and outcomes achievement, and shared templates align your entire campus around strategic goals.
Planning & Self-Study centralizes your strategic plans, goals, and assessments to create a streamlined, repeatable accreditation process that puts everyone on the same page. The solution simplifies assessment process management with customizable templates, workflows, and milestones that align with the way your school works.
Once your faculty members see how easy it is to use Planning & Self Study, they will never return to spreadsheets (and may actually start to enjoy planning!). With automation that reduces the administrative burden, the workspace intuitively guides them through creating annual plans, assigning roles, aligning outcomes and results, reflecting on findings, and establishing action plans. and automating related tasks.
No matter when, where, or how faculty members capture their data, you can easily incorporate it into your Planning & Self-Study hub. Our accreditation software platform centralizes and standardizes how you report on outcomes, show continuous improvement, and plan for a successful future.
Pull results from the assessments and surveys you run with Watermark’s Student Learning & Licensure, Outcomes Assessment Projects, and Course Evaluations & Surveys solutions and use them as evidence of outcome achievement. In addition, integrations with leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) ensure you have timely, accurate, and actionable data always at your fingertips.
Link assessment plans to curricula through automated, intelligent curriculum mapping features. Plan for assessments and align your measures and assessment activities around specific goals. Use the insights and evidence of student learning to improve your curriculum management process and refine the design of your curriculum over time, and easily identify gaps where outcomes can be layered in to achieve expected levels of mastery.
Get a running start by selecting from a library of pre-built templates aligned to the specifications of regional and specialized accreditors… or create your own template, exactly how you need it. Our expansive library of supported accreditation program templates includes AACSB, ACBSP, AMBA, EQUIS, and IACBE for business programs; CAEP and AAQEP for education programs; CACREP for counseling; ABET for engineering; ACEN and CCNE for nursing; and CSWE for social work, plus templates for all regional accreditors.
Easily build out your self-study with the shared evidence library, which allows you to pull in assessment plans as evidence alongside other types of artifacts, such as reports on faculty credentials and contributions from Faculty Success. Situated in a dynamic collaboration space, you can reflect, draft narratives, and review others’ work with comments. Monitoring tools will help you keep progress on track, and once completed, there are many options for sharing the final self-study in the manner expected by your accreditor.
We’ve made program review – an important, complex process – easier by creating a repeatable process that guides and supports you every step of the way. Easily manage review cycles and monitor progress throughout the year so your data is up-to-date and ready for contributors. Communicate expectations and align participants around your requirements with a robust and modifiable template. Empower deeper reflection by automatically pulling outcome results, curriculum maps, annual assessment reports, and more into the program review workspace.
Engage program contributors collaboratively at every step, encouraging participants to gather evidence, reflect on findings, articulate observations, and assert recommended actions. Round out your assessment and accreditation cycles with workflows that engage stakeholders outside the program to share feedback on the report. Their input can be seamlessly incorporated and used to refine plans for continuous improvement.
Planning & Self-Study is just one part of a suite of complementary solutions that intelligently share data, giving you a comprehensive understanding of your institution’s effectiveness so you can drive progress. Our connected solutions meet your school’s unique needs by offering a multifaceted look at key indicators of student success.
Explore:
- Student Learning & Licensure to conduct rubric-based signature and field experience assessments of course and program learning outcomes achievement
- Outcomes Assessment Projects to facilitate valid and consistent rubric-based assessment of general education and other institutional learning outcomes
- Course Evaluations & Surveys to assess the student experience from all angles by surfacing indirect evidence of outcomes achievement for academic and non-academic units
Accreditation Readiness Tools
Accreditation prep doesn’t need to be overwhelming. Exceed your accreditor’s expectations and surface deep insights to drive your institution forward.
Get ReadyEffortlessly include indirect measures in assessment.
See HowSee how Planning & Self-Study simplifies process management.
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"Academic support found the platform very intuitive and user-friendly. While one attendee was initially anxious about the shift to annual reporting, they ultimately said, 'The Annual Cycle of Continuous Improvement provides a built-in focus each year, and Planning & Self-Study is a place for me to see our progress over time."
Michele Atkins Assistant Provost for Accreditation and Research
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