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Mission Assessment and Alignment Program (MAAP)

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:56:58 +0000

The Mission Assessment and Alignment Program (MAAP) is a new initiative designed to document and assess the contributions of the many units and programs that play a role in the undergraduate educational experience at Rutgers. MAAP is focused on six university-level mission goals:

Student Recruitment
Rutgers Pride
Student Engagement, Leadership, and Citizenship
Learning
Progress to Degree
Post-Graduation Success

One of the aims of MAAP is to clarify the ways in which various units contribute to the collective goals of undergraduate education. The program will also help foster a meaningful, goal-based approach to assessment, encourage coordinated planning and improvement efforts across the New Brunswick campus, and provide a foundation for greater collaboration across units with shared goals. MAAP will also help us tell a compelling story about the accomplishments of the University for internal and external publics, including prospective students, taxpayers, the legislature, and accrediting agencies.

The MAAP Process

Programs and schools that participate in a MAAP assessment begin by identifying how their major activities contribute to the undergraduate experience, and in which of the six undergraduate mission goal areas they have the most impact. For example, while Residence Life impacts all six goals, it might see its primary contributions in three areas: student recruitment, Rutgers pride, and student engagement.

In the assessment stage, the program or school examines the questions “How do we define success in meeting our goals?” and “How do others define success for our programs?” Once the success factors have been identified, the program decides what data and information can be used to measure that success. MAPP takes a balanced scorecard approach to identifying measures; in other words, MAAP encourages participants to go beyond the traditional emphasis on financial measures and look for a more comprehensive set of measures that address multiple aspects of program success. These measures, which can be quantitative and/or qualitative, may initially use data that the program already collects. Over time, the measures can be analyzed and improved, so that they present a collective view of activities, goals, and their impact.

Seven programs and schools are participating in a pilot program, and the plan is to extend MAAP to other New Brunswick units in the months ahead. Once the measures have been finalized and data has been collected, the information will be displayed in an on-line matrix that highlights each program’s contributions to the six mission goals. As MAAP extends to more and more programs at various levels, this will eventually result in a multilayered on-line matrix with multiple levels of nested breakdowns of units and assessment results. The matrix will create a visual picture − a “family portrait” − of how the different units and programs align in the goal areas, and will encourage them to begin or expand conversations about how they can plan together to improve the undergraduate experience.

Participating Units

The seven program areas and schools in New Brunswick that are serving as pilots for MAAP include Student Affairs, Public Safety, the School of Environmental and Biological Science, the Office of Undergraduate Education; Non-traditional students; Information Technology; and the School of Pharmacy.

The MAAP program is coordinated by a task force which is co-chaired by Brent Ruben and Susan Lawrence, and includes Barbara Bender, Richard DeLisi, Gary Gigliotti, Carol Goldin, Robert Heffernan, Patrick Love, Don Smith, and Phil Furmanski.

Measures and Dashboards

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:54:34 +0000

People are sometimes confused over the use of the terms “measures” and “dashboards.” What do these terms represent, and how do they differ? Measures – variously referred to as outcome or assessment measures – are organizational tools used to document accomplishments and achievements. Measures can be a useful aid in clarifying, focusing and evaluating the work of the organization. Simply put, measures tell us how effective we are in fulfilling our mission, vision and goals. They provide evidence that can be used to tell how we compare to performance targets and to the accomplishments of peer organizations, and to track improvement over time. They offer a guide to needed improvements, which helps drive planning and priority setting.

These questions can be of help in selecting assessment measures:

What is our mission and purpose?

How will we know if we have been successful?

What do our key stakeholders and beneficiaries value?

How do our peer organizations define excellence?

While outcome or assessment measures tell us what is important, dashboards are tools for displaying and sharing the information/data associated with those measures. Dashboards – in either print or online versions – mimic the function of the dashboard on a car: they provide a visual display of the most important information about performance. The advantage of a visual display is that it presents data in a way that simplifies comparisons and facilitates the identification of patterns, which makes it easier to “tell your story” to stakeholders inside and outside the university.

For example, the Rutgers dashboard for the Upward Bound program highlights outcomes associated with student participants in the program. Graphs are used to illustrate standardized test performance using SAT scores and academic proficiency in math and language arts, as demonstrated on the HSPA test. The graphs compare average scores for three groups: 1) the student population of NJ, 2) District Factor Grouping A, and 3) Rutgers Upward Bound Students. Although it might not be obvious from looking at raw data, the visual display makes it clear that the Rutgers Upward Bound students showed higher levels of performance on both tests than the comparison groups. The dashboard takes the visual display, and makes it accessible to a broader audience.

Rutgers Dashboards Available online

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:52:49 +0000

As academic departments and administrative units at Rutgers continue to expand their assessment efforts, many are utilizing online dashboards to display the data associated with their assessment measures. The Division of Undergraduate Education has partnered with ODL to develop measures for all of the programs within the division, and to create an online dashboard to make the information available. To date, measures have been developed for eight programs, including the Aresty Research Center, the Byrne First-Year Seminars, Career Services, Upward Bound, EOF, and the First-Year Interest Group Seminars (FIGS), and measures for eight more programs are under development. The data associated with several of these measures is being converted into a visual display and placed on the Undergraduate Education dashboard.

The measures reflect trends, accomplishments, and progress toward goals; for example, the dashboard for the Aresty Research Center’s undergraduate research symposium provides a visible picture of the significant growth over the last five years in the number of participants, and also addresses the achievement of the center’s goals by showing that participants strongly agreed with statements that the undergraduate research experience at Rutgers “helped me gain more self-confidence with my academic goals” and “taught me to apply my work at college to real problems.”

The dashboards are publicly available on the Undergraduate Education website at: http://undergraduate.rutgers.edu/dashboard.shtml

The Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning (OIRAP) has developed dashboard indicators for functional areas of the university that are closely tied to the Rutgers mission of teaching, research and service. The 2011 data focus on student access and academic success. In addition to documenting the university’s progress in providing an atmosphere that enables students to pursue and attain their academic goals, the OIRAP dashboard takes on the challenge of benchmarking Rutgers’ achievements against peer institutions. For example, the dashboard shows that Rutgers slightly exceeds peer institutions in retention, and is comparable to peer institutions in graduation rate. The OIRAP dashboard can be seen at: http://oirap.rutgers.edu/instchar/dashboard/DashboardMar2011.pdf

Pre-Doctoral Leadership Institute

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:50:08 +0000

Traditional doctoral education is devoted to preparing students for a career in scholarship or teaching, but these future faculty members complete their degree with little if any of the preparation necessary for assuming organizational leadership roles in academic institutions. There is an increasing need for individuals with doctoral degrees who are prepared for success not only within their own discipline, but who also understand the structure and dynamics of colleges and universities, know the challenges these institutions face, and have the interpersonal and leadership knowledge and competencies to effectively engage the growing array of leadership challenges that confront the academy. The Rutgers Pre-Doctoral Leadership Program (PLDI) was created with this in mind.

The goal of PLDI is to enhance leadership knowledge, competency, motivation and skills early in the doctoral education, and to do so in a way that enhances traditional discipline-based studies. The components of PLDI include both didactic and experiential elements that together, provide fundamental knowledge of higher education from historical and contemporary perspectives, overview the array of problems and opportunities confronting the academy today, and examine approaches and skill sets required of leaders to meaningfully address these challenges.

Students selected as PLDI Fellows participate in a program consisting of several elements:

The Leadership Roundtable focuses on contemporary issues of leadership in higher education, and features Rutgers senior faculty, academic and administrative leaders, and invited presenters from other institutions and organizations. The Spring 2011 Roundtable featured Dr. Robert Berdahl, President of the American Association of Universities (AAU), former Chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley, and President of the University of Texas – Austin speaking on the topic “Challenges Facing American Public Research Universities Today.”
Leadership Issues in Higher Education is a two-course sequence including presentations, panels, case studies, and interactive sessions designed and led by senior faculty and administrators on critical topics in higher education, including governance structures and dynamics, formal and informal leadership roles and responsibilities, leadership approaches and styles, institutional cultures, issues in organizational change, diversity challenges, strategic planning, assessment and accreditation, legal issues, finance, contemporary challenges in undergraduate and graduate leadership, and personal advancement.
A one-day Washington Higher Education Forum provides Fellows with the opportunity to learn about challenges facing higher education from individuals who are directly involved in shaping policy and practice at the national level. Fellows interact with legislators, national higher education association leaders, representatives from the U. S. Department of Education and individuals from other Washington-based organizations and governmental agencies. The 2011 Forum featured meetings with Francine Newsome Pfeiffer, Rutgers University Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations; Dr. Debra Saunders-White, USDOT Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs; Matt Hamill, Senior Vice President of the National Association of College and University Business Officers; Becky Timmons, Assistant Vice President for Government Relations, American Council on Higher Education, and Diane Auer Jones, Vice President of the Career Education Corporation.
Leadership Field Experience is a field-based course in which fellows observe organizational leadership “in action” by partnering with senior academic leaders at Rutgers as they address problems of practice in higher education.
The Capstone Seminar is an integrating experience, providing opportunities for further exploration of themes and topics of interest to the group.

The Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute, under the direction of Dr. Brent Ruben, is sponsored by the University Center for Organizational Development and Leadership, the Graduate School-NB, and the Graduate School of Education with support from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the School of Communication and Information. PLDI is one component of the ODL Student Leadership Development Initiative which has been supported by contributions from Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, the Mellon Foundation, Anne Thomas, Francis and Mary Kay Lawrence, and other Rutgers faculty and staff.

NCCI Announces 2011 Leveraging Excellence Award Winner

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:45:58 +0000

The National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education has announced that the University of California-Berkeley has won the 2011 Leveraging Excellence Award for its web-based disaster planning tool. This resource was developed by UC-Berkeley (which sits on the San Andreas Fault) to address its need for continuity planning. The focus of this tool is “an emphasis on making operations resilient against interruption, rather than on forming detailed plans for recovery.” The planning tool can be adapted to fit the needs of other universities, and over 60 institutions have since adopted it.

Berkeley first developed a web-based continuity planning tool in 2006, and the following year, “UC Ready” was expanded to the rest of the University of California system. Many other colleges and universities expressed interest, and in 2009, UC donated it to the Kuali Foundation, who makes it available to universities on a subscription basis. UC Berkeley has a contract with the foundation through which they continue to host and provide support for the tool (now called the Kuali Ready tool).

The Leveraging Excellence award recognizes best practices that are leveraged to increase their impact, often by dissemination to other colleges, universities, and institutions.

For More Information…

ODL.edu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:21:31 +0000

Resources for learning more about the information in these articles:

Measures

Organizational Outcomes and Performance Measurement, available from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO)

Dashboards

Digital Dashboards: Driving Higher Education Decisions (2003) Harel, E. and Sitko, T. Educause Center for Applied Research Bulletin (Volume 2003, 19).

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard: Beyond Reports and Rankings. Stewart, A. and Carpenter-Hubin, J. Planning for Higher Education (Winter 2000-2001, pp 37-42).

Welcome to our new format

ODL.edu — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:57:06 +0000

Welcome to ODL.edu, the e-newsletter of the Rutgers University Center for Organizational Development and Leadership. This new format will make it easier for readers to access our available content.

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