Response to Pandemic: Academic Continuity

ACADEMIC CONTINUITY has emerged as the term for contingency planning that allows continuation of educational programs following a disruption in campus services. The current swine flu pandemic may be the first widespread example although higher ed institutions impacted by Hurricane Katrina can claim a prior learning curve.

Katrina led to a number of initiatives among higher ed institutions that helped New Orleans students meet graduation requirements when their schools closed. Especially through distance learning, courses were delivered as well as important social support. A major initiative at the time was the Sloan Semester, a collaborative delivery of courses (for 4000 enrollments) organized by the Sloan-C Consortium. A retrospective report on the 2005 effort explains that the online offerings were pulled together in 21 days.

In the years since Katrina, more higher ed institutions have given attention to the matter of delivering courses during disruptions to campus services. Some institutions have stated bluntly that a canceled semester could cause lay-offs. Business, facilities, and IT operations have long traditions in BC or Business Continuity. Typical concerns are emergency response and disaster recovery. Documentation almost always reflects these concerns; the concept of documenting preparation for academic continuity is relatively new.

Interest in contingency planning has been evident among some distance learning providers, with the purpose of having back-up procedures for LMS (learning management system, such as Blackboard) outages. On some campuses the conversation has shifted to using an LMS as the "off-campus" substitute for holding classes in the case of a campus closure.

Sloan-C's dedicated web page on the topic of Academic Continuity is a good starting point for exploring next steps—or first steps.

© 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.

Informing the purpose of ePortfolios

A couple of favorite references help to inform the purpose of ePortfolios, without setting boundaries on purposes. These uses, functions, and types also help to remind that approaches vary.

Lorenzo and Ittelson (2005) identified these uses:
1. advisement, career preparation, and credential documentation,
2. the sharing of teaching philosophies and practices,
3. department and program self-studies,
4. institutional and program accreditation processes.

And also these functions:
1. plan educational programs;
2. document knowledge, skills, abilities, and learning;
3. track development within a program;
4. find a job;
5. evaluate a course;
6. monitor and evaluate performance.

Greenberg (2004) described three types of ePortfolio from a temporal perspective:
1. showcase, organized after the elements have been created;
2. structured, with a predefined organization for works before they are created;
3. learning, with an organization that evolves as the works are created.

Lorenzo, G., & Ittelson, J. (2005). An overview of institutional e-portfolios. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, ELI Paper 2:2005, 8.

Greenberg, G. (2004, July/August). The digital convergence: Extending the portfolio model. EDUCAUSE Review, 31.

© 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.

ePortfolios: All works or selected works?

Last week, Ray Tolley commented here that my look at ePortfolios ignored the gradations between directed and not-directed types. (He is right.) He raised another important issue, "multiple concurrent audiences" of students' ePortfolios. That speaks to his question, "Should the ePortfolio contain all of a student's coursework or only selected samples?"

The easy answer is that it depends on the purpose of the portfolio. I like thinking about purposes of portfolios and tomorrow I'll post some of my standard sources on that topic. But Ray's question deserves much more lost sleep than an essay on purposes can generate.

All coursework or selected samples? Entire body of work or representative works? And who would judge the representativeness? (Apologies for that noun.)

I lean toward the strategy of reflect and select and then reflect some more. When the portfolio author reviews all products, a self-evaluation is begun. When the author selects a set of products, critical thinking must be employed for a style of assessment we rarely undertake consciously: identifying what we want to represent us (and knowing why). When the author then reflects on that set of products, the self-evaluation is complete (or at least ended).

Can a collection of all works be as successful? Would the ePortfolio strategy simply be collect and reflect? Or just collect? Might the collection better be called a repository? Do we end up back at the easy answer? It just depends on the purpose of the portfolio.

© 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.

ATARI: Not the Computer

ATARI is the Assessment Training and Research Institute, a first annual event hosted by Florida A&M's Office of University Assessment. Training in the six steps of the FAMOUS approach are at the center of the conference, helping participants to "implement and manage a successful assessment system." One of the goals of ATARI is to support assessment efforts of HBCUs, minority institutions, and community colleges.

May 23 - 25, 2009
Tallahassee, Florida
Conference fee $300 by May 8
Late/Onsite fee $375
Marriott Springhill Suites Tallahassee Hotel East $99/night
Go to the ATARI web site for more details.

A full explanation of ATARI resides on the the same web site. The ATARI OVERVIEW (linked here) provides rationale and outcomes for the event. (Nice example for all conferences.)

© 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.

Inventory of People and Resources for ePortfolio Decision-Making

Continued from yesterday:
Inventory of people and resources to support decisions about ePortfolio platforms

1 - Our students use an LMS for course work. Yes/No
2 - Our students use blogs/wikis in course work. Yes/No
3 - Our students use specialty software in course work. Yes/No
4 - Our faculty incorporate technology in their teaching. Yes/No
5 - Our faculty maintain their own web sites (personal or course). Yes/No
6 - Our faculty manage their own course spaces in an LMS. Yes/No
7 - Our staff are available to assist students/faculty in learning new software. Yes/No
8 - Our helpdesk tracks queries to identify training needs on campus. Yes/No
9 - Our helpdesk coordinates FAQs or other knowledge base with new software additions on campus. Yes/No
10 - Our administrators are responsive when additional funding is needed for training/support for new software. Yes/No

"No" answers indicate a need for caution in selecting a platform or style of ePortfolio. More structure and pre-defined templates will support students and faculty in their work. This typically means opting for a commercial ePortfolio platform.

"Yes" answers indicate less need for caution and potentially a "free choice" approach to media. But even if a campus has 10 Yes's on this list, a program still may opt for a commercial platform. The reason might be to insure known costs of support.

© 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.

To direct or not direct the required ePortfolio

This tale of two ePortfolio plans is based on real-life.

Two academic programs require students to create a portfolio of course works prior to graduation. Both programs utilize the portfolios in their own "IE plans," meaning their annual outcomes assessments that inform institutional effectiveness. That's where the similarity ends.

Program A gives its students complete freedom in selection of works as well as selection of medium. Briefly, the list of common media includes PDF files burned to CD/DVD, web sites posted on the Internet, web sites burned to CD/DVD, web pages created in free ePortfolio platforms, sets of materials residing in joint access web sites such as Google Docs, and ePortfolios created in commercial ePortfolio platforms.

Program B directs its students to assemble an ePortfolio with specified course products in a pre-defined structure, uploading files to a pre-selected ePortfolio platform.

As different as these approaches are, both have the potential for supporting students in achieving student learning outcomes. And both have the potential for meaningful assessment.

An argument might be made that Program A appears to encourage creativity while Program B appears to encourage conformity. That argument drops by the wayside when the most creative of Program B students utilize the pre-selected platform as merely the entry point for the ePortfolio, which proceeds with multimedia files and innovative use of technology.

The next argument might be that Program A challenges students to master new technology and Program B does little more than assign the next PowerPoint software. What may not be immediately obvious is the tremendous support a pre-selected ePortfolio platform has to offer, especially to the student who is inexperienced in handling electronic files let alone assembling a body of work for public display.

Rather than assume that one approach is superior to the other, an academic program is wise to take inventory of its own resources and its students' technical proficiency to predict which approach will fit the local environment.

Tomorrow: What that inventory might look like.

© 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.

Academic Analytics from the ELI Archive

Academic Analytics was a presentation at ELI* in 2007 and now resides on the EDUCAUSE web site, along with 4 years' worth of webinars. John Campbell reported on Purdue's IT initiative launching analytics to support accountability, including the ares of learning outcomes and student success.

The topic of data mining is not necessarily new (for a 2007 audience and even less the case for a 2009 audience) but Campbell's commentary brings together data mining, course management systems, and potential uses for accreditation. Campbell uses non-technical language to describe basic models and also Purdue's goal of identifying students "in trouble."

Locate the audio file of Academic Analytics at:
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/AcademicAnalyticsANewToolforaN/162057

Locate the longer list of resources in the Archive (2005 through 2009) at:
http://net.educause.edu/node/8996

* ELI is EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, the research arm of the organization. ELI holds conferences and services member institutions. ELI products are shared publicly after 6 months' of member-only access. See the ELI site for a wide range of resources, including audio and video presentations.

© 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.

Creating Presentation Graphics: Comics

The content is the humor of assessment, which one must find where one can. Creation is through an online tool by which one can create a comic strip in a few minutes: Make Beliefs Comix.

It actually takes a few minutes, twice or thrice. My third attempt finally produced type large enough for the typical bifocal-age faculty audience on a campus. The web site's instructions make perfect sense after experimentation (but only after experimentation).

Designed as a teaching tool, Make Beliefs Comix is likely immediately obvious to the elementary school students who use it. For those of us who cannot claim the intuitive sense of the young, the site takes a little longer to master. Tips: Click on Print/Email to... yes, print or email. It took me a long time to notice the Print part of that line. Create a text message in a speech or thought bubble and then use the enlarge tool to make the text more readable.

© 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.

New URL for GPI: Global Perspectives Inventory

GPI stands for Global Perspectives Inventory, an online instrument that is just a couple of years old. Publications about its use are on the rise and the instrument authors share pre-publication manuscripts with their mailing list.

For information about the instrument and a list of current publications, see the web site at its new URL, https://gpi.central.edu . For personal attention, email the very approachable principal, Larry Braskamp (braskampl@central.edu), formerly of U of Illinois, CHEA, and Loyola U Chicago.

On the web site's page for Information & Documents, the last linked item is called "Our views on use, nonuse, and misuse of assessment." It's a thoughtful and organized guide not just for planning to use the GPI—the opening 10 principles can be applied to other assessments, as well.

(I have used the instrument with a client and have found the GPI staff to be helpful and prompt. I don't earn a discount for that endorsement.)

© 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: EDU Checkup Revisited

Five months ago I wrote about EDU Checkup on this blog when Nick DeNardis was pretty new at reviewing higher ed web sites. At that time, Nick had only 7 "episodes" in the can. Today, the number is 72 and the Archive alone is fun to read.

From that archive you can click hyperlinks to Nick's several-minute video critiques of, well, 72 institutions' web presence.

For added bonus for the techs among us, you can also read all of Nick's design tips in the Tip Archive.

If you're not sure you care about higher ed web design, here's another way to phrase it.... marketing.

© 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.

Content from the MSCHE Web Site

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) has some "good finds" on its web site. I recommend the Events menu tab.

Calendar
User-friendly calendar of MSCHE workshops and conferences with valuable cues of Open to the Public and By Invitation Only clearly marked. In this calendar, it's the red text (not the blue) that serves as hyperlinking to detail pages. Events for the remainder of 2009 are listed with sites in New York, Delaware, Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia being the most common location).

Presentation Materials
Like most organization web sites today, past conferences are featured with presentation displays available for download. While the brief text of a PPT slideshow may not satisfy, some gems are also present. In the re-cap of the MSCHE 2008 annual meeting, this is one: Ephraim Schechter's presentation on Planning General Education Assessment [PDF]. Skip to the mid-way point of the PDF file for a set of hyperlinks to examples from institutions across the country. They comprise the evidence for Schechter's assertions, and are labeled according to the PPT slide numbers. Schechter's research is genuinely helpful in keeping up with trends in the U.S.

© 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.

Ashford U: Quality Matters Implementation Plan

Quality Matters (QM) has announced a new recognition level for programs or institutions preparing to adopt the QM course review system across all their online and hybrid courses. The new recognition is the QM Implementation Plan. The first institution recognized with an approved plan is Ashford University, an on-ground and online university accredited by HLC/North Central.

Most institutions are more familiar with the original QM Rubric review system, through which individual courses are reviewed and recognized. QM publishes the names of courses and their faculty developers of the QM web site (click on years near bottom of page).

Institutions subscribe to the QM organization and then may either conduct subscriber-managed (internal) reviews or contract with QM for official reviews. A Peer Review team uses the research-based rubric to evaluate courses. Updated regularly, the rubric maintains its standard of at least "B+" performance for recognition.

QM will hold its first national conference June 7 - 9, 2009, in Baltimore. Registration fee is $345 for QM subscribers, $395 for non-subscribers. The QM conference web site includes information on low-cost lodging ($119 to $129/night).

© 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: You Tube EDU

Higher ed has its own corner of YouTube now, called YouTube EDU. Searching for institutional clips is therefore much easier (and safer) than making a general search on the main YouTube site.

A search for "assessment" was productive, though a little broad with close to 100 results and some discipline-specific items (such as clinical assessment). Look for the EDU search box (image below) beneath the general YouTube search box.

© 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.

A Starter Kit for Learning Outcomes Assessment

Chapman University (Orange County, California) publishes its Starter Kit for outcomes assessment in an Excel file, a compact set of 4 sheets outlining the expectations for assessment efforts as well as providing the templates for planning and reporting.

The "How to" sheet presents steps (below) with examples from other universities and definitions to guide the work.

Step One: Say What You Do
Step Two: Do What You Say
Step Three: Prove It
Step Four: Improve It
Step Five: Document It

Links:

1 - Chapman's Learning Outcomes Assessment web page

2 - "Starter Kit" Excel file

© 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.