On October 26, 2009, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) issued the results of its first annual survey of Provosts and Chief Academic Officers.  When I read the press release and skimmed through the survey, I asked Dr. Jennifer Stephens, our Associate Vice President and Dean of Assessment, to provide me with a guest article describing the survey and the significant findings.

For those of us working for regionally accredited, market-driven institutions, the survey confirms that we utilize assessment and assessment tools in many more ways than traditional research institutions.  I cannot speak for all for-profit institutions, but we embraced assessment as a tool when we realized its value in diagnosing what worked and what didn’t as the online learning field continued to evolve through improvements in pedagogy and technology.  A group of like-minded, for profit and non-profit institutions joined together to form Transparency by Design (TBD), an initiative to publish learning outcomes in a common reporting format.  As we continue to utilize assessment for quality improvement, our faculty will gain the knowledge of what works better for online teaching and our students will benefit through better designed and better instructed classes and programs.  Organizations like NILOA and TBD will share best practices with the goal of providing better outcomes for students.

I think you will enjoy reading the results of the survey as summarized by Dr. Stephens.   I look forward to seeing future surveys that indicate that progress in the utilization of assessment tools is being made by all institutions of higher education.

Over the past decade, calls for assessment and accountability have increased as the educational community has become more vocal about the need to be more systematic in assessing student performance.  This is evidenced by: 1) regional and national meetings that focus on assessment; 2) accountability initiatives such as the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN), and Transparency by Design; and 3) the recent sharp increase of assessment tools and organizations that focus on the assessment of student learning outcomes.

To better understand the dynamics of student learning outcomes assessment in higher education institutions, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) was launched in 2008 to assist institutions and others in discovering and adopting promising practices in the assessment of college student learning outcomes. The vision of the NILOA is to discover and disseminate ways that schools can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families and other stakeholders.  The NILOA project is based at the University of Illinois and Indiana University. Stan Ikenberry and George Kuh serve as co-principal investigators, and Peter Ewell serves as a Senior Scholar. The initiative is guided by a National Advisory Panel and supported by foundations including Lumina Foundation for Education, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Teagle Foundation.

To advance their mission and as their first big project, the NILOA surveyed provosts or chief academic officers at all regionally accredited, undergraduate-degree-granting, two and four year, public, private, and for-profit institutions in the U.S. about the assessment activities conducted at their institutions.  In the spring of 2009, the questionnaire was administered to 2809 institutions.  There was a 53% response rate with 1518 schools responding.  

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Charles Town, West Virginia, APUS’ headquarters, is replete with history.  As a history buff, I have found the history of this town fascinating.  For those of you who don’t know, Charles Town and Jefferson and Berkley County were part of the state of Virginia until 1863 when President Lincoln transferred them to West Virginia.  Some of the descendants of residents from the 1800’s still consider themselves Virginians.  During the War Between the States, the area was vital to both sides and the occupancy of the town changed hands numerous times.  Currently, the area is recognizing the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and his trial in Charles Town, Virginia.  Because these sesquicentennial events are occurring throughout 2009 and 2010, I thought I would provide a brief summary of John Brown, his life’s dedication to the abolition of slavery, the raid, and the trial. 

John Brown was an American abolitionist born in Connecticut.  After an unsuccessful attempt at becoming a Congregationalist minister, Brown married Dianthe Lusk and moved to New Richmond, Pennsylvania where he opened a tannery, a venture that became quite successful for the family.  In 1832, following complications from the birth of Brown’s seventh child, his wife, Dianthe, died.  Soon after, however, Brown married sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Day with whom he had an additional 13 children. 

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Today, APUS will be awarded the 2009 Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education at the Sloan Consortium‘s International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Florida.  The Sloan Consortium is a membership organization of approximately 1800 higher education institutions, dedicated to improving online learning.  The Gomory Award has been given annually since 2002 to “an institution that has demonstrated its commitment to assessing and improving the quality of its online education programs through quantitative application of the Sloan-C Quality Pillars.”  Prior to 2002, the award was given but not named in honor of Dr. Gomory.  Though schools could nominate a single degree program, a cluster of programs within a specific department or school, or the online degree offerings of the institution as a whole, APUS decided to nominate itself using the third criteria listed above.

The Ralph E. Gomory Award is named for Dr. Ralph E. Gomory, President Emeritus of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Dr. Gomory has had an illustrious career that includes Chairman of IBM Research’s Mathematical Sciences Department from 1965-67 and eventually IBM’s Senior Vice President for Science and Technology, the position from which he retired from IBM in 1989.  After his tenure at IBM, Dr. Gomory became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation where he became a pioneer in the field of online education.  Dr. Gomory has served as a Trustee of Hampshire College (1977-1986) and of Princeton University (1985-1989).  He served as a board member of the Washington Post Company.  He also served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from 1984 until 1992.  In 2007, after nearly two decades as President of the Sloan Foundation, Dr. Gomory became President Emeritus and continues to play an integral role in the development and improvement of online learning programs.

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I really don’t know how I heard about David Kord Murray’s book, Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others.  It could have been recommended to me by Amazon.com or I could have read a book review of it while traveling.  Nonetheless, I found the concept intriguing enough to purchase a copy.  The book stimulated so many ideas that I could not wait to pick it up again whenever I had the chance to read a few chapters.

Murray is one of those interesting people that few of us have the chance to meet.  He was educated as an engineer, graduating from the University of Vermont in 1982, and later obtained his MBA from Pepperdine University.  Early in his career, while at McDonnell Douglas, he had the opportunity to work on the Space Shuttle program as well as the MX missile.  Later, he went into the financial services business, founding several companies and later working at Intuit as its head of innovation.

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I recently read an interesting article by David Brooks called “The Education Gap.”  Published in The New York Times on September 25, 2005, Brooks talks about the ability of colleges to address the inequities between poverty and wealth.  He points out the fact that only 28 percent of Americans have college degrees but that most of those with degrees find themselves in social situations where almost everybody has been to college.

Brooks notes that behavioral differences are starting to surface between the groups.  According to Brooks, divorce rates are twice as high for high school grads as college grads, high school grads are twice as likely to smoke, high school grads are much less likely to exercise, college grads are twice as likely to vote, college grads are twice as likely to volunteer, and college grads are twice as likely to donate blood.

Brooks maintains that today’s information society has increased the gap between high school and college graduates.  In an information society, a college degree is a must.  Students need to recognize the importance of that as early as ninth grade in order to prepare for college.  Students from families with parents who have attended college have a greater chance of going to college than students from families that don’t have a parent who attended college.  Furthermore, Brooks states that students in the lowest per capita income quartile of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of graduating from college versus students in the top income quartile who have a 74.9 percent chance of graduating from college.

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This past Thursday, October 15th, APUS had a ground breaking ceremony at the site of its newest addition to the Charles Town, West Virginia campus.  Construction will soon begin on a four-story LEED certified building that will house our Academics and Admissions departments.  The building will sit on a site of abandoned and underutilized former industrial space including a junkyard.  The building will be approximately 45,000 square feet of office space for our expanding academic administrative staff and our admissions department and will represent a significant economic investment in the downtown Charles Town area.

One of the tangible actions to which APUS committed when I signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in September 2007 was a policy of building all new campus construction projects to LEED Silver standards.  The newest addition to the APUS Charles Town campus will meet or exceed those standards.  Environmentally friendly elements of the building will include solar panels on the roof which should provide some 30 percent of the building’s energy needs, bike racks to encourage employees to cut down on commuting by car, parking spaces for energy-efficient vehicles, highly efficient insulation and windows, a modern variable refrigerant HVAC system, and lighting controls to manage energy use, to name only a few.

As APUS has expanded its campus to house a growing staff tasked with accommodating the needs of our increasing student body, we have remained mindful of our responsibility to our Charles Town neighbors as well as our environment.  The new building will blend old and new, traditional and modern in an attempt to keep it similar in character to the historic nature of Charles Town’s other buildings, most of which were constructed in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. 

Joining me at Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony in addition to APUS staff were various members of the local Charles Town community as well as several state representatives.  David Lloyd, Director of the EPA’s Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, was also in attendance and expressed his approval of the planned construction and use of the brownfields site for this purpose.

Please see below for a photo gallery of images from the ground breaking event.

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