Assessment & Benchmarking.
How do you measure success, growth, development, and change in your organization?
Assessment
With increasing frequency, higher education institutions, accrediting bodies, and state and federal education agencies have been negotiating their respective roles in quality assessment and effectiveness testing. Accountability, transparency and transferability have become the watchwords of the U.S. Department of Education in higher education. In collaboration with higher education representatives, department leaders have been attempting to arrive at common methods of reporting quality: student learning, skill acquisition, retention in school, time to degree completion, job performance, or other measures.
What does this change of focus—increased accountability—mean for institutions? For more than 20 years, Hezel Associates has helped institutions measure program impact and organizational progress. Evaluation is an essential step in any successful educational or business endeavor, playing a key role in stimulating growth and planning for change. Hezel Associates’ research-driven approach to evaluation emphasizes intentionally linking program goals, program elements, and participant outcomes to assess program or project effectiveness.
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Benchmarking
For years, industry has used benchmarking as a tool for measuring internal progress and external standing. Higher education institutions, too, have come to use various forms of benchmarking – particularly for their undergraduate programs. On behalf of and in conjunction with NUTN, Hezel Associates has launched the Benchmarking for Quality in Distance Learning Study to explore the issues related to benchmarking for distance learning, and to assist college and university distance learning organizations in building their own benchmarking capacity.
In 2006, Hezel Associates, in partnership with the National University Telecommunications Network (NUTN), launched IQAT: the Interactive Quality Assessment Tool. An online benchmarking tool, IQAT helps distance learning administrators’ measure and manage change by tracking distance learning program performance data over time and comparing it to that at other institutions.
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