A twelve-week (40-hour) course designed for institutional staff who collect, analyze, and act on data—including those responsible for developing KPIs, supporting strategic planning processes, and building or maintaining institutional effectiveness systems.
Gain essential grounding in best practices for establishing or enhancing your institution’s effectiveness and planning cycle. Led by Dr. Ray Rodriguez, DEAC’s Director of Institutional Research, you will:
- Review relevant literature
- Engage in one-hour, live, weekly discussions with peers at DEAC institutions
- Review and refine your own institutional plans and practices
- Conduct hands-on review and provide consultative feedback to a partner to strengthen real-world implementation skills
Expected Outcomes:
At the end of the course of study, you will be able to:
- Generate strategic planning processes tailored for your institution
- Evaluate the effectiveness of planning and assessment practices at all levels
- Design effective institutional effectiveness practices
- Establish relevant KPIs to measure effectiveness across the institution
- Develop institutionally appropriate learning assessment strategies and processes
- Choose mission-aligned taxonomies of learning (Bloom’s and beyond)
- Formulate evidence-based recommendations for institutional improvement, based on analysis of a peer institution’s planning, effectiveness, and assessment practices.
CEUs Awarded
Participants will receive a DEAC-branded certificate documenting 40 hours of academic engagement, equivalent to 4 Continuing Education Units (CEU)s.
Note: every professional association and regulatory body has its own standards for the type of CEUs accepts. Please verify requirements if you intend to use this course to fulfill requirements for a particular licensure, certification, etc.
Cost:
Comparable professional development programs offered by quality assurance organizations, accreditors, and higher education associations typically range from $50 to $100 per hour of participant engagement, with cohort-based and applied institutes frequently advertised for well over $1,000 per participant.
To encourage broad participation and strengthen institutional effectiveness, strategic planning, and assessment practices across the community of DEAC-accredited institutions, our inaugural academy is offered at a highly subsidized rate of $450 per participant.
Online Format:
Weekly sessions will be held on Zoom. Sessions are interactive; participants should plan for cameras-on discussion of weekly suggested readings, institutional practices and challenges, and applied activities.
Resources will be provided and course work products posted on Moodle course. Participation in online Moodle discussions is optional.
Limited Space Available & Active Participation Essential
Enrollment is capped at 24 participants to allow for deep discussion and individualized consideration of each institution’s practices.
In addition, the consultation component requires both a willingness to share details of one’s own institutional practices and data (as appropriate for privacy protection) and a commitment to engage robustly with a peer institution’s materials.
As such, DEAC asks participants to commit to:
- live participation in at least 9 of 12 scheduled sessions (Thursdays at 1pm ET)
- approximately 2 to 2.5 hours of weekly out-of-class activity
Schedule & Content Overview
Class Meetings (Interactive Discussions):
Thursdays, 1 – 2pm ET
Sept 10 through December 3
(no meeting the week of Thanksgiving)
Unit 1 (Weeks 1 – 3)
Future State:
Strategic Planning
Unit 2 (Weeks 4 – 6)
Current State:
Institutional Effectiveness Plan
- Mission, Vision, Values:
- Differentiating Strategic Planning and Institutional Effectiveness (Tactical) Planning
- Current State Analysis (SWOT, SOAR, PESTLE, SCORE, NOISE, etc.)
- Formulating Strategy, Goal Setting, and Action Plans:
- Long-term planning
- Implementation, Monitoring, and Closing the Loop
- Practical Application: Review Strategic Plans
- Choose Partner Institution for Unit 4 Consultation
- Review your institution’s strategic plan and processes and your consultancy partner’s
- The IE Cycle Overview
- Data-driven Cycle Connecting Mission to Action
- Key Performance Indicators, SMART Goals, and Action plans
- immediate to short-term improvement actions
- Assessment, Reflection, and Closing the Loop
- Practical Application: Review Institutional Effectiveness Plans
- Review your institutional effectiveness plan and processes and your consultancy partner’s
Unit 3 (Weeks 7 – 9)
Immediate State: Assessment
of Student Learning
Unit 4 (Weeks 10-12)
Capstone:
Consultation Projects
- Selecting and Operationalizing a Taxonomy of Learning
- Bloom’s, Marzano’s, etc.
- Clear learning objectives aligned with taxonomy
- Backwards Design
- Determine “mastery” before creating learning Activities
- Develop intentional content to reach ‘mastery”
- Develop Formative and Summative Assessments
- Aligned to the taxonomy
- Means of Measuring Performance on Assessments
- Rubrics and meta-tags
- Practical Application: Review Assessment Practices
- Review your institution’s assessment of student learning practices and those of your consultant partner
- Complete the Review of Materials from the Consultation
- Prepare the Report of the Consultancy and Present to the Agency
- Paired Presentations of Lessons Learned from the Consultancy and How it Helped Inform Self-evaluation
Instructor:
Dr. Ray Rodriguez, DEAC’s Director of Institution Research, is dedicated to making data and statistical analysis accessible, whether it’s in supporting dissertation research, helping police on the beat tell how well they’re contributing to safety outcomes, or working with institutions to develop KPIs and action plans.
Following a distinguished career in criminal justice, Dr. Rodriguez’ higher education experience includes serving as Full Professor of Education and an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice as well as 15 years as a Vice President. His areas of expertise encompass research methodology, both quantitative and qualitative analysis, institutional research, strategic planning, academic operations, learning outcomes assessment, and curriculum development.
Dr. Rodriguez holds an Ed.D. in Learning Analytics from Northcentral University, an MA in Law Enforcement and Justice Administration from Western Illinois University, and a BA in Criminology and Criminalistics from Northeastern Illinois University. Additionally, he is a veteran of the United States Air Force and a graduate of the WASC Assessment Leadership Academy, Cohort VI.
