Industry Survey Reveals a Disconnect in the Way Assessment is Implemented in Higher Ed

Explorance offers solutions that address this lack of synchronicity between faculty members’ and assessment administrators’ expectations.

Montreal, QC, October 24, 2016  Explorance, the leading provider of Learning Experience Management (LEM) solutions, announces today that the results of Inside Higher Ed’s 2016 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, released this morning confirm Explorance’s market perception that a growing disconnect exists with regards to current assessment effectiveness in the higher education market.

“These survey results point to a key challenge facing higher education today,” said Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed. “Assessment process is now required by accreditors, state leaders and others to measure student learning. The real question now is whether this can be done in ways that help faculty members in teaching and students in learning,” he continued.

Survey results indicate that university stakeholders realize assessment and accountability are important, but do not necessarily think that faculty members are sufficiently involved in the process or that the data collected is being used to its full potential.

Nearly two thirds of faculty members surveyed believe that assessments are geared primarily towards satisfying external stakeholders, from politicians to accreditors. In addition, there is no concrete evidence that the obtained assessment results aid in the improvement of teaching excellence or graduation rates. All the while, technology administrators in the university or college setting perceive that significant discussions on how to use the assessment data do occur.

Explorance’s all-in-one assessment system, Blue, helps bridge this gap. A Blue implementation encourages a cross-campus iterative process, while deploying a cascaded course evaluation framework and taking into account teaching and learning priorities at every institutional level. This also ensures that sufficient control is retained at the administrator level.

By considering specific learning contexts and cycling back to stakeholders for regular feedback, the solution provides university decision makers with access to a global yet detailed and current view of their institution. Since the assessment is a cascaded implementation process, it prevents a common pitfall in the implementation of course evaluations, where the process is either too centralized at the institutional level or too decentralized at the instructor level.

“The implementation of the Blue assessment system has already proven to be a viable solution to eliminate this disconnect in several universities,” said Samer Saab, CEO of Explorance. “In the coming months, we look forward to working with other higher education institutions to ensure their assessment goals and results are in sync, so that they can focus on continuous improvement while keeping all stakeholders satisfied,” he added.

For details on how your educational institution can improve assessment implementation for better accreditation, while enhancing teaching excellence and increasing student graduation rates, read about the Blue All-In-One assessment system.