Strategies to integrate technology into campus outcome management

Most well designed technology enhanced solutions require a substantial investment from academic leaders and faculty on campus in order to yield more turn-key reporting and analytics going forward.  The level of effort depends on the maturity of the campus learning statement hierarchy and the comprehensiveness of course outcome to program goal to institutional mission statement mapping and articulation.  If these components are well-established then populating a system should be a matter of formatting the data for import into the software. 

A good implementation plan begins with a discovery and needs assessment phase to determine the current climate on campus and to obtain both short and long-term goals from academic leadership.  Implementation specialists should then tailor the software to integrate with the situation at the institution while also challenging project participants to incorporate best practice assessment strategies when current practice is following a less than optimal process. 

Faculty resistance to any technological solution is often ameliorated if the presentation of the solution is couched in terms of improved student learning and/or improved instructional effectiveness.  In this case, a technology solution for learning outcomes management does that, and faculty developers can leverage that attribute by emphasizing that a focus on learning outcomes improvement in higher education preceded accreditation calls for outcomes-based assessment.  In that regard, managing and improving student achievement of outcomes is merely an aspect of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and the technology solution becomes a tool to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of helping students succeed instead of yet another time consuming addition to faculty workload. 

Inevitably, institutions find gaps in their outcome assessment strategy when they decide to embark on a technology enhanced solution.  This is completely natural and part of the process of continuous improvement.  A major point of advice for those in charge of implementing an outcome management solution is to start small so pain points can be identified and process improvements can be made before it becomes a huge task to update the process for an institution-wide adoption.  Assessment experts from accreditation agencies also advise institutions to capture only the amount of data they can digest and to feel empowered to take a break from the data collection process if they need time to process information before gathering more data.  The worse situation is a case where an institution is consumed by assessment without actually learning anything.