I went to a very good conference at Elon University on Wednesday--the North Carolina Independent Schools and Universities Assessment Conference. One of the speakers was Jean Yerian from Virginia Commonwealth University. They have developed their effectiveness planning management system into a commercial product that she demonstrated for us. You can get more information at www.weaveonline.net. I'm not sure what the cost is, other than it's FTE-driven. The strengths of the system seem to be rich reporting features including and administrative overview that quickly shows compliance status. So if the English Department is slow about putting their plans, assessments, actions, or mission on the system, it shows up as Not Begun, In Progress, or Complete. They are planning to add a curriculum mapping feature that creates a matrix of courses and content per discipline. There is a comment box that allows notes about budgetary impact of activities and follow-up plans. As yet they do not have a document repository built into it, but I think that may be in the works too.
This product has many more features than openIGOR does, and it's designed with a slightly different purpose in mind. The functionality of openIGOR starts with the file repository and builds up from there, whereas WEAVEonline goes in the other direction. A weakness of both systems currently is that they do not tie directly to evidence of student learning without extra work. The logical extension of each of these systems would be a link to a portfolio system. We currently have an electronic portfolio system, but it's not connected directly to assessment reporting yet. I hope to have that programming done this summer, though.
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Now, if you wrote an evidentiary link to OSP, Weave or openIGor would have an immediate installed base to attract.
ReplyDeleteYes, we're going to do something like that with our portfolio system. WEAVE online is probably a more natural match for OSP since there isn't any meta-data in openIGOR regarding classes or rosters. It's more than I can bite off right now to try to put that in there. Good idea though. I'll have to learn more about OSP.
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