Day of Dialogue included Conversation about VPAT

More than 100 people gathered in San Francisco yesterday for a Day of Dialogue about ePortfolios. Guided by the ePortfolios in the CSU Advisory Group, the attendees selected seminars from three tracks: Assessment, Teaching and Learning, and Workforce/Professional Development. The CSU Advisory Group members represent considerable hands-on experience in selecting and implementing ePortfolios on their campuses as well as interpreting uses for other educators (through their web site as well as in venues such as the Day of Dialogue).

Among the topics of yesterday's discussions was VPAT, Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. A PDF document by San Jose State University explains what is essentially a guide for vendors to demonstrate ADA compliance for electronic and information technology. (Thanks to SJSU Associate Vice President Mary Jo Gorney-Morena for her impromptu explanation of this issue, with examples of the commercial LMS vendors that meet these requirements.)

More detail is available in reports of the CSU Accessible Technology Initiative.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

UW Colleges: Their Assessment Journey

This week a team from University of Wisconsin Colleges described their "Assessment Journey" to an audience at the Texas A&M Assessment Conference. Detailing their progress from 2003 to 2008, the several administrators from different campus spoke candidly about moving from departments' limited participation in assessment activities to systematic and comprehensive assessment that they call "truly institutionalized." Among the Colleges' new approach to documentation of assessment is a web site devoted to resources and also to their annual reports.

The UW Colleges number 13; they are two-year campuses with 17 academic departments linked across the campuses. As one of the speakers at the A&M Conference explained, she may have only two other faculty members in her discipline at her campus, but many more in the same discipline across 12 other campuses. The larger faculty group meets face-to-face twice a year and many times virtually and by phone the rest of the year.

In creating their assessment system, campus stakeholders first spent 2 years identifying the proficiencies to be measured system-wide. They created a rotation system of assessments so that every proficiency is measured in a 2-year period. Participation by faculty is mandatory: every instructor must assess at least one section per semester. (Instructors teach 4-5 sections; when 2 or more have the same prep, they commonly run the assessment in all those sections.)

The institution reported 12,479 "unique assessments" for Fall 2008. The unique assessment reflects one student in one assessment in one course.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Report from Texas

The Texas A&M Assessment Conference is underway in College Station, drawing participants and speakers from around the country but with predictably heavy attendance by Texans.

Here are some official and unofficial messages from sessions pertainng to Gen Ed in Texas:

Report released this week statewide from THECB: Designing Texas Undergraduate Education in the 21st Century. Identifies critical areas and proposes strategies and best practices.

Proposed legislation of interest: to reduce required credits in certain Government curriculum; to address optional internships and tuition.

Continued discussion: legislation to address mandatory internships.

Renewed interest: in foreign language in the core curriculum (Gen Ed), for wellness perspective in the core, for thematic approach rather than content category of the core. Example of thematic approach: the first-year experience.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Software Update from TaskStream

TaskStream has announced its winter upgrade with new features for the student portfolio system called LAT, Learning Achievement Tools.

Among the new features is Outside Evaluation, the ability to add evaluations after an initial score release to the student. In other words, the evaluation can be planned in two stages: first for the student to receive feedback or evaluation (typically from an instructor), and then for outside evaluators (other than the instructor) to make an assessment.

Prior to this upgrade, a student work could be scored by one or multiple evaluators before the score release (to the student) but not afterward. The new option is an ideal support for program and institutional assessment: the single artifact uploaded to the portfolio can be viewed and evaluated for multiple purposes, each with its own electronic record.

The TaskStream LAT upgrade happens on February 25. Some of the other features are Standalone Survey Tool, Due Dates + Reminders, Test & GPA Scores Import, and Admin Only Area. The feature titles communicate the purposes well and reflect common wish list items for educators who utilize eportfolio software.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

eFolio Summit: Low cost users' conference

At $65, the August gathering of eFolio users (and potential users) will qualify as one of the least expensive user group conferences in the country.

eFolio is the eportfolio software developed in Minnesota and available nationally. Find details about the systems, as well as broader resources about porfolios, at eFolio World. Minnesota has emerged as a national leader in the planning and execution of institutional portfolios.

The conference noted above is called the 2009 eFolio Summit, billed as Where eFolio Practitioners Explore eFolio World. Pre-conferences (prices not yet set) will run on August 5; concurrent sessions will run on August 6 (registration fee set at $65). eFolio users in K-12, higher ed, and workforce organizations are also invited to propose sessions. Location: Minneapolis Community & Technical College.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

ePortconsortium's Resource Page

Don't be put off by the older dates on this web site. Items from several years ago are highlighted frequently but the overall collection is not stale. The ePortconsortium.org Resources page is a rich annotated (and hyperlinked) list of ePortfolio software packages, projects, and examples.

The consortium is a set of developing members (working on Epsilen, for example) as well as individuals and corporations. Founding members were IUPUI, Bowling Green State U, U of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, Penn State, Maricopy Community Colleges, and UCLA. Today's member count: 1190 individuals and 896 institutions. Representation is from 68 countries.

Exploring the site, you can also link to the newer group space that includes conference announcements. Some of the resource links go nowhere, a frequent problem with extensive listings. On the other hand, the nature of educational technology has some protections: many of the resources listed may have long moved the intended page but still load a link or a web page that permit you to locate newer material on the subject. And for those of us who still persist in making reference to the Syllabus conference and magazine, there's an efficient link from the old name Syllabus to the current day Campus Technology.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

The Idea Center: Free Pilot for Course Evals

The (non-profit) Idea Center offers a free trial of course evaluations for 25 classes. That pilot opportunity can also be extended for 275 more classes, at reduced fees. Finding prices requires some poking around the web site, so here's a direct link for the fee schedule for 2008 - June 2011. Scroll to page 2 for prices for online instruments.

Idea's approach to evaluation includes this language: student ratings of instruction. Those ratings may be in "short form" or comprise a longer "diagnostic." An administrative review of courses may be satisfied by the short instrument. IDEA's experience is that faculty seeking feedback for improvement in their courses (or for documentation for tenure and promotion) benefit from the diagnostic ratings.

The Idea Center is the outgrowth of Kansas State's IDEA Student Ratings System, begun in 1968. The Center was created in 1975 to disseminate the methods to other institutions. It became a 501(c)(3) entity in 2001.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Webometrics: Ranking the World's Universities

How university web sites rank does not necessarily reflect their academic excellence, of course. But a research company that offers rankings suggests that an institution compare its "webometric ranking" and its self-perceived excellence and ask hard questions about any difference.

The company is Cybermetrics Lab of Spain and the web project is the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (link opens to the top 50 of the top 4000 institutions worldwide). The preponderance of U.S. universities is immediately visible. Stats backing up that preponderance are available from the menu.

Sampling the front page of the top 4000: MIT, Stanford, and Harvard are at the top. Iowa State closes the page in 50th position.

That American universities would lead in the rankings could be predicted. First, U.S. academic institutions were among the first organizations to build sites, especially "deep" sites to support archived materials and projects. Second, the technical talent located on campuses supports the work. Third, the marketing aspects of the web have been well understood in the States.

Cybermetrics started ranking university web sites in 2005. Today, they attract 2000 - 6000 unique visitors a day, which they document through a link to StatCounter ("Statistics" link on the menu). Their formula combines four indicators: visibility (50%), size (20%), rich files (15%), and citations (15%). Visibility is measured by external inlinks (from other web sites). Size refers to number of web pages, as determined by several search engines. Rich flies is a tally of PDF, Postscript, Word, and PowerPoint file types. Citations are tallied by Google Scholar. (See Methodology on their menu for full details.)

Locate the right-hand menu to access rankings of repositories, hospitals, business schools, and research centers.

Non-technical conclusions about how institutions may improve their web ranking are offered under the menu item, Best Practices.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Auburn U: Best Short Course on Assessment

Best short course on assessment resides at the web site of Auburn University's Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. It is very short. Besides being concise and to the point, the displays are well suited to screen reading. With just seven topics, Auburn's OIRA nevertheless communicates all that some stakeholders will want to learn, probably at a teachable moment before the next plan or report is due.

Sample language is provided in the short course. The institution's local standards are reflected (especially concerning mission statement and scope of outcome statements) and the message is clearly "this is how to do it here." Admirers on other campuses may not have reason to link to the short course as much as be inspired by it to create their own helpful short courses.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Utilizing a Free Web Poll

In an earlier blog on online survey software, I emphasized my own interest in free and low-cost survey options. It's not time to update that list yet but this free offer from Snap Surveys deserves a mention:

SnapShot Poll is a "free web poll" from Snap. It may be the shortest free survey you can run on the web. It's exactly one item long. (See the rest of the web site for information about software for sale. A colleague reports that the software is worth the price in the low thousands.)

Here's a link to an example of the one-item survey. (On some web pages the code embeds the graphic nicely; on this blog, it did not but Snap provides the linking code, too.) Set-up takes about 3 minutes. Snap does not limit the number of polls you create.

Campus Economics Poll

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Recession Realities

News of the recession is not hard to find but the impact on higher education appears in spurts. There is no handy chart to track the impact and news commentators have not created an index for us. Higher ed media certainly do report on campus economics but the usual mix of stories does not permit easy tracking of progress or decline.

Ray Schroeder has created a blog dedicated to the topic to chronicle the changes created by the global recession. New Realities in Higher Education presents a cohesive set of news stories that naturally builds a history, blog-style. Schroeder also includes links to editorials and feature articles.

The blog might be called depressing (excuse the pun) as the news is all bad, but it's a sound way to track the economic impact across the country and across institution type. Privates, publics, large, small—reports vary from budget cuts to enrollment reports.

(Schroeder also edits the Online Learning Update (U of Illinois) and Educational Technology, among other publications. They can be accessed through the New Realities link, above.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Online Communities for Graduate Students

Graduate Junction provides space for networking by graduate researchers, intending to serve current graduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers.

Cross-disciplinary approach is evident in the site's determined use of keyword indexing instead of discipline-specific categories.

A central team relies on a network of volunteers to build the site. Users' profiles and forums are the activity of the site but some interactive tools (such as Conference Diary) make the information suitable for use beyond the site.

GradShare similarly reaches out to the graduate researcher. Its networking site carries no advertising but the sponsor is the company ProQuest.

Upon clicking Explore GradShare, the user is asked to identify a discipline. The display of discussions, however, draws from across disciplines.

GradShare's subtitle is "Graduate Student Community" and its discussion forums back up that claim, with topics of high interest for peer comment: thesis/dissertation (committee selection and advisor relationships among the subtopics), job search/career planning, work-life balance.

Focusing primarily on postdoc appointments, the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) also includes university faculty and administrators among its audience. Resources regarding mentoring are listed, addressing perspectives of both mentor and mentee. The site has high information value even if you are not in the postdoc business.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.