Accreditation Through Assessment
The IME department is presently involved in a university-wide review of all program assessment plans as preparation for the 2005-2006 ABET Accreditation visits.
Dr. Betsy Aller and Dr. Steven Butt represent IME on the CEAS College Assessment Committee (CAC) that was created in Fall 2001 to establish college-wide academic assessment programs to ensure that all programs are continuously monitored and improved.
Dr. Aller heads up the IME Assessment committee charged with implementing the recommendations of the CAC. The IME team has established course assessment procedures that were put in place this year. Last year, CAC sent an employer survey to 46 companies that hire many WMU-CEAS graduates, implemented the first cycle of a course reporting policy, and created templates for publishing educational objectives.
During 2003-2004, CAC has requested that the IME department implement the assessment plan, develop quality indicators from the assessments, establish a template based on the indicators, and publish education objectives and the results of the course reports to assess academic program quality.
OASIS provides relief
Drs. Betsy Aller and Colleen Phillips head the OASIS (Online Assessment System with Intelligent Support) project, which is now entering the user testing stage. Assessment is the process of measuring and analyzing student performance or learning skill and giving feedback to the student to improve future performance. Assessment for continuous improvement is also at the heart of accreditation of programs in engineering and technology, which requires teaching and evaluating such skills as teamwork, communication, ethics, lifelong learning, and so on.
Materials for evaluating and assessing these skills are not always readily available to busy engineering and technology faculty, and those instruments that do exist may not be clear in terms of strengths, weaknesses, and best applications. Thus, a need existed for a library of useful assessment instruments, annotated as to their best use and application.
Funded by a $64,000 Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) grant from WMU, the OASIS project has compiled a library of annotated instruments for assessing students’ skills in written and oral communication and in teamwork. These instruments range from simple checklists to detailed rubrics, to be used either to provide a grade and/or feedback, or to serve as a guide to assignment expectations.
Faculty can locate appropriate instruments either by sorting through the online library themselves, or by answering questions from an online decision tree that then will steer them to instruments that respond most directly to their needs. OASIS will be available from any networked computer. By the end of fall semester, OASIS should be available to support, evaluate, and assess student learning in communication and teamwork.
University Assessment Grant
Dr. Betsy Aller, professor Tom Swartz, and librarian Dr. Barbara Cockrell are developing instruments to survey students’ development of lifelong learning skills. Funded by a University Assessment Grant, the “Assessment of Life-long Learning by Engineering Students” tested its first survey tools in a Summer 1 2003 IME 102 Technical Communication class.
Common first-year core curriculum
Drs. Paul Engelmann and Azim Houshyar have been working with members of other CEAS departments to produce a common first-year ABET accredited curriculum for all engineering students. IME faculty members have submitted recommendations about the contents of the common curriculum. For information on ABET accreditation, please contact ABET at www.abet.org
Presently many engineering students enter specialized engineering programs when they first come to college and then change to another program later. In the process, they often lose credits for courses that are program-specific, which increases the length and cost of their college experience.
In the proposed common curriculum, all engineering students would take the same courses the first year and then decide a focus from the various CEAS engineering programs. Having complete fluidity of transfer would give students adequate time to select a major and not lose credits because they are taking courses that fit all engineering curricula.