Even though the paperwork hasn’t been completed and we have yet to receive a “final” report, our on-site review team gave us a “two thumbs up” for our compliance and focused reports. The QEP Initiative–GEMS, Gateways to Excellence in Math and Science, was “approved” so that we can go ahead and start working on the project; there are some things to improve, just the same. The final report will likely indicate a need to improve the assessment portion of the project, tying together outcomes and objectives more closely to specific interventions and long-term goals. That said, we’re glad to get the “go ahead” to start working on this exciting project.

Thanks to our Visiting Committee for their insight - and thanks to those at UTD who spent many, many hours working to make the reaffirmation project a success.

Special “props” to Serenity for her unflagging efforts to edit the often uneditable, to Simon for making tools grow to meet user need and to simply user interaction, to Mona for scanning as if there were no tomorrow, to Metta for her stubborn streak that ensured everyone met deadlines whenever possible, and to Julie for trying to herd cats when it came to make all the arrangements. Special thanks to Robert Nelsen for tackling a rough assignment and making it work.

Because the UT Dallas Compliance Certification Report is so extensive (500 pages plus supporting documents numbering over 100,000), some of us thought it might be a good idea to make a brief version available for those of you who are interested. To that end, a brief (albeit 46 pages) summary of the Compliance Certification Report is available online at http://dox.utdallas.edu/narrative1041.

(And you thought I’d gone away?  tsk tsk)

Yes, after the off-site review, we had a bit of housekeeping to do, and that has resulted in the Focused Report(s). The QEP proposal is also a part of this submission. As a result, on 31 January 2008, we’re submitting both the Focused Reports and the QEP to our on-site Review Team.

They’ll have three ways to view the Focused Report: in printed form on paper, on a CD (with all the documents included), and online via the web site. The QEP initially be available only on paper or on the CD; we’ll not post the QEP documents until we have a final-final–incorporating any suggestions or feedback we may get from the Team. (We want you all to think we’re perfect, after all.)

So it’s another rush to get things done, but we’re approaching our deadline - and once we’re done, we’re all going to sit back and breathe deeply for a day or two - and then we’ll get back to work on the budget!

Yes, the sound of contentment as one lies back and relaxes, the long and slow exhalation of breath that comes from knowing the compliance report has been collated, packed, shipped, and received at each location.

After that unfortunate incident whereby UPS managed to misplace a package from a vendor in San Francisco, the very vendor who was re-creating the binder index tabs for the notebooks - it is good to know it all came together.

Serenity, Simon, Mona, Rhonda and I went to Kinko’s/Fed Ex on Thursday last to put the finishing touches on it all and ship it out.  That done, we convened at TGIF’s for a light lunch before returning to pickup the tracking information on the 12 or 13 packages.  We headed back south to campus and spent a few last hours putting the finishing touches on the website (well, Simon did that).  And we all left Friday to spend a week-end away from the dreaded report that has occupied so much of our time over the last 18 months.

So now we get to re-focus on the QEP while the reviewers spend the next 2 weeks reviewing the UT Dallas response to the principles of accreditation.

Next milestone:  The external reviewers convene in Atlanta in November to identify potential areas for focused reports.

But for now, I’m back at the desk working on the myriad other things that have had to slide for the last couple of weeks.  Once I’m “caught up” (as if that’s really possible), I may start to feel human again.

And for all those who helped make this thing really come together, THANK YOU!

…but that tunnel still seems awfully long from here - and that light still seems mighty small.

Okay, we’re getting there. We are pushing to finalize all last edits before we turn it all over to the folks who will “bang” on the review site to test the system, the documents, and the accessibility. Lauraine O’Neill in Communications has done a great job of putting together the notebooks for the “hard copies” of the report - and they look cool. (Okay, that mermaid theme bothers ME a bit, but I can live with it.) Rhonda and Reena are still wrapping up edits. Robert has enlisted a small army of folks to bang on the system next week. Simon and Mona are already putting things in final form for those reports that are really done. (There are more than I’d expected.)

Okay, so this isn’t a lot of news for you, but it’s great news for the team!

Good grief! There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel still seems awfully long from my vantage point.

It’s all hands on deck for reviewing narratives and editing narratives and supporting documents. Summer syllabi are still hovering around 90% - but 2nd session has just recently begun for summer, so it’s not as bad as it might seem on the surface. (Hey, some of the fall syllabi are already in - like 4% or so!) Ben and Justin (our wonderful grad students) are tagging documents for the dox library and for the reports. Dianne is still pulling transcripts for grad students. Org charts. TA Orientation. Faculty orientation. Sheesh.

AT6 was opened for FY08 within the last few days. That’s a good thing (and a bad thing). It means folks who are already seriously planning FY08 can proceed while some folks are still trying to finalize their reports for FY07 with analysis of data and evaluation of strengths and weaknesses in outcomes.

We canned the mock review (happy happy, joy joy); that means we just keep writing and editing and cleaning and scrubbing and ….

Oh yes, that SACS QEP thing is the 22nd through 25th. Sibert, Kane, Metcalf, Montgomery, and Coleman.  Wow, what a group!  Sibert leads the QEP.  Kane is our tech guru who keeps building programs that keep everyone moving along at a clip.  Metcalf will shift some duties to include supporting QEP.  Montgomery is currently involved in the UTeach initiative, and there are some interesting potential tie-ins with the QEP, and Coleman remains out guy with the data that helped get us where we are in QEP planning.

And now it’s kinda official:  We’re doing some kind of review with our SACS rep from Atlanta on 14 August!  (Gotta look at that principle list again to see if I’m missing something.)

Tara Reid may have counted backward (however falteringly) from 60 on New Year’s Eve, but we’re counting down from today for the last run toward our due date for the draft of our compliance report. So, today is the 3rd of January, and that leaves us a MAXIMUM of 116 days (weekends included, as well as spring break) to finish this stuff.

Yikes!

“So where are we as of today?” you may wonder.

• We’re still collecting syllabi for the spring courses (well, we’re sorta actually beginning) - and we’re about to open up a new and improved Syllabus Submission Tool that will make everyone’s life better (insofar as syllabi go).
• Core curriculum (general education) assessment has been passed off to the Core Curriculum Committee (makes sense, huh?). The committee is working to finalize some modification of the core objectives for some of the areas. Why make those changes? Can you say “closing the loop”? After reviewing a prior term’s submissions, the committee members agreed some changes were needed. (And this is more than the “Mission Accomplished” banner on a ship’s deck.)
• We’re preparing for next Friday’s (the 12th) luncheon and meeting. We’ll be working with President Daniel, Provost Hobson Wildenthal, and the movers and shakers of the Academic Side of the House as we discuss program assessment strategies (call that tips and tricks for the moment).
• Committees galore are working on their assigned “SACS Principles” (and the accompanying reports, supporting documents, and head-scratching).
• And we’re still thinking this is doable. (Well, a lot of folks believe that. There is a distinct minority moaning some oppostiion.)

Basically, we have a long way to go and not a whole lot of time to go with it. That’s okay, though. Most of us are accustomed to working under pressure.

More to follow….

As a group, the executive team is feeling a bit better about recent progress.  Simply, the core curriculum assessment reports have come in at a higher rate than earlier anticipated - AND - program assessments are coming in a bit better as well.  Okay, it’s not perfect and 100%, but it’s better than the summer rates.  On top of that, we have already collected over 300 “supporting documents” for the compliance certification section; we don’t know that we’ll use them all, but we have them ready just in case.

Also, the faculty credentialing piece has picked up some momentum of late.  The “credentialing tool” has proven a hit with the credentialing team; it allows a must faster search and review capability than relying on paper copies in files hither, thither, and yon.

In the Wednesday meeting (today, 15 November 2006), we had a chance to review some of the notes Fearless Leader (FL) Nelsen has gathered from his conversations with sister institutions in the same process.  The basic message of the meeting was simple enough:  No matter how much information we present, we need to keep it as simple and organized as possible.  No one (at least no one in his/her right mind) wants to wade through stacks of documents (paper or electronic) just to find the answer to a straightforward question (such as, “How many of your academic programs have used assessment results to effect some curricular or delivery improvements?”).  [Huh?]  In an effort to find a more simplistic summary of such info, we’re in the process of developing (yet) another form/template [Don't worry; it's one WE fill out] to summarize departmental and programmatic assessment and “closing the loop” activities.  We’re using the basic idea from UT El Paso and reworking it to meet local needs and activities.

Another important discussion point in the meeting was the degree to which we (as a team) want to hold firm on deadlines set for compliance certification documents.  The basic answer:  We need to hold firm when we can.  The catch:  Many of our reports will rely on the reports related to other principles.  As such, some reports simply can’t meet the “early” deadline unless another report is submitted ahead of schedule.  (Okay, here’s an example:  Our U205 / 2.5 / Institutional Effectiveness can be submitted early — and already has been submitted in draft form — but the final draft will need to incorporate information from the reports for 3.3.1, 3.4.1, probably something in the faculty principle set, and something from the business/finance set — and definitely something from the educational sets.)

FL also summarized a recent meeting with Commission President Dr. Belle Wheelan–a meeting in which several folks from UT System had the opportunity to interact with Dr. Wheelan and ask lots and lots of questions.

We also had a chance to review some of the info related to the QEP, especially the movement toward a QEP committee or council.  Plans are moving ahead to pull together a smaller committee to summarize and categorize many of the ideas already submitted before the process moves into a more public forum.

So, there you have it:  Another week of SACS.

I take a week off, and the blog is woefully behind the times now. Seems the SACS Team does just fine without me. (I think I’m glad about that, somehow.)

Over the course of the past two weeks, the Team has been working feverishly to catch up on core curriculum assessment documents, WEAVEonline pastes, and changes in processes for editing and in the technology solutions.

We now know that the Commission has further refined the principles for a vote in December; we anticipate that vote will be in the affirmative. Because this will be, effectively, the third set of principles during our brief journey, we’ve taken to renumbering them for internal use. Anything that used to be 2.5 or is like a newer 2.5 is now U205. With whatever changes come down the pike, we can replace the “U205″ with the new principle number any-and-everywhere. Okay, it’s a bit clunky, but it beats the heck out of asking everyone to go back and re-edit their documents “one more time” to change the numbering of the principles they’ve references or, worse, to reword the entire principle they’ve cited. Yes, some of the old principles have new parts in addition to new principles.  (Okay, this is not really new, but it’s worth repeating to make sure you get the idea that the principles are not set in stone.)

As for the techie stuff, Simon and Serenity co-opted a lot of server space to generate a folder system for each committee and each principle (one of the U’s).  Each principle has subfolders for final submission, documents, and restricted documents. It’s the committee’s space; we don’t go and dig around in their stuff.  When the committee does submit something into the “submission” folder, a little flag pops up somewhere and Serenity goes and pulls the document for editing.  (Pretty cool, huh?)  The security on this was probably along the lines of nightmarish; each folder has specific people authorized, and that’s a lot of folders.  Because this is now in place, we’re going to archive the old “sacs drive” (like one of our other g:\ drives - on the network) and ask that people file their documents responsibly.  (Seems we had a major pile of stuff no one was able to identify with certainty.  Pity.)

On another positive note, the Core Curriculum Committee managed to get a stranglehold on some of the reports from summer term and have identified a process by which the committee members can reasonably review the mass (yes, that’s an “a” and not an “e”).  Also, they agreed to “decertify” some of the courses from the core, especially some of the variable credit (V) classes.  This will help tremendously in clarifying the general ed component across the board.

Seems the Student Affairs side of the campus is moving ahead strongly, as is the Business Affairs side.  Each group is making significant progress in their efforts to populate WEAVEonline with their program assessments.  “Way to go!”

Okay, more change.  We’re probably going to use the NSSE data more than we’d originally thought.  Dr. Redlinger has tied some of our local results to specific principles, and with multiple years of data, we’re able to look both forward and back at what can be and/or was done.

Also, we’re purchasing a three-year subscription to Academic Analytics “Faculty Scholarly Productivity” reports so that we can draw some concrete comparisons between our own PhD programs/faculty and another 16 of our peers and/or competitors.  It may be a bit pricey, but we think it’s going to give us some very useful data for SACS and for much more as well.

On the QEP front, John Sibert has continued his string of meetings with plenty of students and some staff groups.  He now has over 70 different “ideas” that have been presented.  Within the next week, we’ll begin selecting committee membership for a group to review the various ideas and to start looking for the common themes so that we can begin the winnowing process.  We expect some strong movement toward a final section in early 2007.

And, for what it’s worth, we continue to have meetings.  Just this week, both the Academic Assessment Committee and the Steering Committee met.  While there was some overlap in the information, the focus was a bit different for each.  For the assessment folks, obviously we spent more time on assessment (duh), but the real focus was on building a better internal process for making the assessment program more effective and less time-consuming.  With the Steering Committee, we spent more time talking about our general progress, but we also focused on some serious issues related to the compliance certification reporting.  We need to ensure that our processes provide sufficient oversight, but not too much oversight; enough editing, but not too much editing.  We simply want to make sure the “flavor” of the committees’ work remains a major part of the final report.

And one more little note: Simon has been turning out new versions of the tools this week, and his latest tweak of the dox engine include a number of plug-ins usable in Firefox 2.0.  They are really cool.

So, that’s about it for now.  (And did the election results please you or frustrate you?)

Executive Committee Meeting - 18 October 2006

Fourteen gathered in the SACS conference/work room and offered brief comments regarding progress from the past week.  As examples,

• Mona found more hidden syllabi from the summer (yikes!);
• Simon was finalizing updates for the assessment tool (beta v2) and those went into effect that evening;
• JoyLynn is still struggling under a mountain of assessment plans and reports for general ed courses;
• Justin, Diane and Abby appear to be making considerable headway on finalizing the fall listing for faculty credentialing;
• Diane has finished data input for paperwork to evaluate faculty transcripts from non-US institution;
• (you get the idea)

Robert indicated a need for the group to refine its priority list - at least for the short-term.  Given the recent explosion of data to be entered for other faculty and staff, we’re behind.  (For what it’s worth, we’re offering this support service this term because of the multiple versions of templates, etc., that have been distributed; for next term, that responsibility shifts back to the departments.)  He indicated that “cutting and pasting” needs to move to the head of the list, at least for the team’s immediate focus.  As much as possible, Ben, Metta, and others will work on “getting caught up” on the assessment plans and reports as well as on some of the basic data entry in WEAVEonlnie.

The group also decided that it would be very helpful to find outstanding examples of assessment plans and reports to share with the assessment tool users.  Everyone working with the plans will be seeking such examples to have them posted within the assessment tool.

John Sibert also indicated that he is feeling a real need to form a committee/team to begin reviewing QEP topic suggestions and ideas.  He and Robert will meet to review a list of “possibles.”

So, there you have it.  Another week of progress.  Given we’re nearing the autumnal equinox, I guess this is a good thing.  I only refer to the time in this manner because once the vernal equinox comes back around, we need to be wrapping up this first cycle/draft/process and moving on toward final drafts.

(It is autumnal and vernal, right?  Whatever.)