Informing Adult Learners with Data - the College Choices for Adults Model

As the higher education landscape changes, it will become ever more important for colleges to express publicly what they expect their students to learn in a given program, how they will measure that and how well recent students have performed on those measures. Equally important will be showing how learners progress and complete at the institutional level. The Transparency by Design initiative which publishes the College Choices for Adults website, has created a framework for institutions who join to publish this information. In this session we'll explain the rationale behind the framework as well as discuss the improvements partner institutions have made to their internal processes to streamline the collection and reporting of this data. Provosts, VP for Institutional Effectiveness, Assessment or others involved in the assessment and planning of program learning outcomes will benefit from attending this session. This session will address the reporting of program learning outcomes, measures for assessing those program learning outcomes and how well recent students have performed on those measures of program learning outcomes. It will also address the internal processes at partner institutions for gathering this data and preparing it for reporting on the College Choices for Adults website. It will also discuss how the learner progress metric developed by the initiative improves on metrics currently available to measure completion and retention. We will also include the role of reporting on College Choices for Adults in the changing landscape of distance higher education. The learning goals of this session will be to inform participants of the internal and external benefits of gathering these data. We expect participants to leave this session with a clear idea on how they could implement this type of data gathering at their institution as well as with an assertion of why their institution would benefit from membership in Transparency by Design and reporting on the College Choices for Adults website. After brief presentation of the data elements, we will moderate a discussion on how these elements currently work at partner and audience institutions and how that could change using the Transparency by Design College Choices for Adults data framework. The Transparency by Design initiative began in 2008 as a project of the Presidents Forum. In 2008, the initiative approached the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) to serve as the third party quality review as well as project management. In November 2008, WCET and its parent organization, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), were awarded a grant by Lumina Foundation for Education to fully implement the Transparency by Design initiative and develop the College Choices for Adults website. The data were released on the initial launch of the College Choices for Adults website on August 4, 2009. During the following year, development of the data set and other resources for potential adult learners continued and the site was relaunched August 4, 2010 with a renewed look and feel. The site continues to grow, with several new data items coming online in April 2011, including institutional level results on the Priorities Survey for Online Learners and the ETS proficiency profile, for institutions who have implemented these assessments.