Carteret Community College Title III Grant

Our powerpoint presentation – October 11, 2007

This is Don Staub & Fran Emory, presenting at the fall meeting (October 11, 2007) of The North Carolina Association of Community College Instructional Administrators . Here is a synopsis of our presentation, along with postings of the relevant documents that we are using throughout the Outcomes Assessment process at Carteret Community College.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of what has transpired at the college since October, 2006, when we were fortunate enough to have been awarded Title III – Part A funding from the US Department of Education. The five-year grant provides significant resources to strengthen our efforts in: 1) distance learning, 2) advising, and 3) overall assessment. You can read an abstract of the grant and download a pdf of our full proposal by clicking on this sentence.

Today’s presentation will focus on the assessment component.

To begin with, it is important to provide a context for Carteret CC.
CCC is a relatively small college (curriculum, unduplicated enrollment is ~1,500) located on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina. The college has 34 instructional programs, with an increasing number of courses offered online (~120 at last count). Courses are taught by 68 full-time, and 95 part-time faculty. The college is supported by a wonderful staff of 108 dedicated individuals.

In terms of an across-the-board assessment plan at the College, CCC is not all that different from many other community colleges that have not been through the SACS accreditation process lately. That is, we, like any other educational institution, “assess”. Of course, the distinction is in the defintion. That is, assessment has been limited to faculty assessing their own courses, programs (especially those not receiving external accreditation; e.g. health science programs) providing output data on an annual basis, and some administrative units (if they’ve had the time), providing annual output data as well. In other words, the college has lacked a purposeful, systematic, institution-wide assessment process that includes outcomes assessment for all instructional programs and administrative units.

Efforts to impact institutional effectiveness have often relied on anecdotal data (We are persistently “intuitive!” as Dr. Barwick emphasized at yesterday’s keynote). Such an approach has not led to significant gains in our attempts to improve our poor retention rate (regardless of which category you are examining; e.g. first-time, full-time; distance learning; etc…).

Title III funding has provided the resources that allow us to make a broad, concerted effort to shift the dialogue at the college to one that focuses on an assessment-based approach to improvement and effectiveness, in both instruction and services.

As we progress through today’s presentation, we will refer to a number of documents and “artifacts” that we have created in this change process. They include:

** Our Institutional Level Learning Outcomes matrix (as of 9-07)

The ILLO Matrix

** A powerpoint presentation used for workshops on the Instructional Program Review process:

Instructional Program Review workshop powerpoint

The Instructional Program Review manual

** A powerpoint used for workshops on the Administrative Unit Review process:

The Administrative Unit Review workshop powerpoint

Administrative Unit Review manual