Assessment of Learning Committee Notes from the Meeting of March 22, 2010

Assessment of Learning Committee Notes from the meeting of March 22, 2010

Present: J. Simon, C. Subramaniam, D. Grogan, C. Gold, J. Soden, R. Bergeman, M. Kline, J. Noyes, K. Laureano-Ribas, R. Lewis, H. Storms, K. Holt, C. Striepe, L. Gallucci, B. Jaffe, J. Shankweiler

The duties of note taker will be rotated. Kaysa Laureano- Ribas, Claudia Striepe have served, next volunteer, Chris Gold.

Opening Remarks:

Work has begun on the CurricuNet module. CurricuNet found a school with similar requirements to us, Elgin Community College, Illinois, that we can use as a sample layout site. This may save some time. In the Summer Jenny will begin migrating the proposals, SLO forms, assessment reports, etc. over to CurricuNet.

Agenda:

Item 1. Jenny Simon noted that the 6th core competency regarding Information and Technology Literacy had been passed by the Academic Senate last week, with some good feedback. Jenny will try and arrange a presentation of the core Competencies to the Board of Trustees at some future date.

Item 2. Jenny called for general committee feedback on this updated list of deadlines which she had discussed with the facilitators at their last meeting. The first date is September 17th to complete a review of current SLO’s and compare them to the core competencies mapping, and to ensure each area has an SLO corresponding to the 3’s and 4’s core competencies ratings.

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions:

Maybe this should be another Flex Day activity?

Can our core competency ratings still be changed? Jenny felt this might be difficult because of all the documentation and it would be easier if done via CurricuNet. However, it would not be impossible as the documents have not yet been turned into Institutional Research (they are due there by April 29th) The outcome of this mapping will be to make adjustments to the SLO’s if they do not line up with the competencies. If the SLO’s need to be adjusted, this can be done through Curricunet. We do not have to go through the CurricuNet Committee if we are only making adjustments to the SLO’s.

Divisions will be conducting Program level assessments this Spring. A Program is considered an overarching statement. There are different types of Program assessment. Individual courses will be looked at later in the process. There was a question about whether we might need a cap on faculty and individual course assessment. Currently the part- time faculty involvement issues is still under discussion, but once that is settled, they may be able to help in this regard.

“All course level SLO’s must be assessed every 4 years” seems to be the mandate. Jenny noted that CurricuNet should make visualization of this process easier. Will this 4 year deadline be based on the Program Review cycle? Another mandate states “Each course level SLO must be reviewed in a Program Review cycle”. There is some confusion here as there is still no settlement on the negotiations regarding how often to do Program Review, so it is difficult to make a statement. Jenny decided to wait for further information.

Linda asked whether the Feb. 15th deadline should include ALL Student Services programs. Jenny said yes.

It was noted that the college catalog would be online and would be the catalog of record. The catalog will contain the program level SLO’s , but not individual course SLO’s. There was a suggestion to have a link to Division/Unit/department web pages to access course level SLO’s.

On the question of individual course sections assessment, Jenny suggested leaving it up to individual participation, bearing in mind that participation is part of faculty self- assessment. This is not currently the case for adjunct faculty. It was noted that we need to have comparable data from the Compton campus.

Christina suggested adding to the very beginning of the deadlines a Spring 2010 reminder “Conduct Program- level assessments.”

Jenny will send this updated deadline list out to faculty soon.

Item 3. The plan for the core competency assessment is just a draft plan, with many questions to be resolved.

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions:

One question is how this data should be used? It was suggested that Planning and Budgeting, Summit sessions, Accreditation, Educational Master plans, and Program Review could all benefit from the data.

Linda noted that the core competencies are institutional and therefore be used by institutional planning bodies, or come back to us for us to make recommendations to institutional planning entities. It was recommended we give the data to Arvid Spor “The Spor Report”. Linda said it was senseless to spend all this time on analyzing data that would not be used. Christina noted that different core competencies would inform different areas, some might fit with the Technology planning, for instance, while others would fit with the Campus Plan. But these are still high- level campus- wide bodies that fuel/feed the master plan. It was suggested we also ask these bodies what information they make be looking for, for future planning – although it may be too late for Core Competency 1.

Another question is what form the Summit should take? The date set is 10th week of Fall2010, 29th October. Should this be a whole day affair, or morning sessions with lunch?

The ACCJC has various concepts of what a core competency is and should achieve. The competencies should be assessed at a degree level, tied to general educ. Outcomes, tied to institutional effectiveness. It was suggested that our summit be broken into groups that discuss how the core competencies inform their decisions and their work. The campus players who effect change also need to be involved in planning the summit. We (the LAC) may be the cog that started the business moving but the institution needs to drive the direction we need to move in. Basic Skills folks should be there too.

The summit should begin with an overview of what has been done and then break into groups like Gen Ed, Master Plan people, etc. We should meet afterwards to see if it was an effective assessment or where/if changes need to be made. The feedback loop is important. We will also seek recommendations at the summit.

It was noted that the Core Competency III had had a wording change requested to alter “verbal” to “spoken and signed”

The goal is to decide whether the core competencies are correct, or what we can change in our methodologies. Then we can close the loop on core competency 1 and move to the next competency in the 6 year cycle, aiming to complete one core competency per year. Jenny Simon will talk to Arvid Spor.

We should start to think of questions for the survey.

Ideally, this will be a 3 question email survey. Irene Graff expects a 14- 15% response rate to this survey, which is considered good. One question would ask for student id 3’s. This would allow access to much information, besides allowing us to know what stage of their academic career the students are in. We do want student completors. We have a short-ish time frame to get the questions ready and the survey out.