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?)