Accountability As Opportunity: Tapping the Transformative Power of Accreditation

Published:
Presentations and Seminars
Author(s) and Contributors:
Author(s): Gary Brown Joan Lippincott Vicki Suter Steve Ehrmann
Source(s) and Collection(s):
Presentation(s): ELI Meetings
ParentTopics:
Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

Over the past three years, the Transformative Assessment Project (TAP) team has been working on tools designed to help institutional teams that have been tasked to plan and/or implement a major change for their program or institution to transform teaching and learning with technology, in institutions that:
- are involved in significant institutional improvement of teaching and learning with technology
- use assessment in a variety of ways to guide and support that effort
- share a commitment to the purposeful application of assessment and dissemination of assessment results to support deep change

At the same time, increasing pressures are being brought to bear on higher education for accountability to external agencies and stakeholders, ranging from regents to state legislatures to accrediting agencies. Steve Ehrmann refers to these forces as "lightening strikes" on the institution and notes that institutional responses can dissipate such energy into dysfunctional behavior, or turn it into a force for transformation. Representatives of the TAP team will review the work of the team and of participants at the NLII 2003 summer focus session on the topic; they will present the plans for a kit for transforming accreditation self-study pressures into a catalyst for a new institutional culture of evidence and transformative assessment.

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