Benchmarking: The Best Practice That
Reveals Best Practices
Competition and Better Alignment Fuels Distance-Education Assessments
Jill Stirling, Public Relations Assistant
Benchmarking emerges as a practice in higher education as institutions aim for better alignment with national expectations and accountability takes center stage. Distance education, in particular, strives for quality assurance to attract more consumers in a competitive environment. Moreover, faculty and administrators in distance education must rely on hard data since face-to-face contact with students is rare and often non-existent. Relentlessly heightened scrutiny prompts distance educators to demonstrate the quality and merit of their programs. Through benchmarking, these programs and institutions can provide solid performance evidence to parents, students and policymakers.
Simply defined, benchmarking is the internal and external process of measuring factors from one organization against similar factors from another organization to create standards for improvement. In this way, benchmarking as a best practice—a method that generates outstanding results—reveals best practices through comparison and application.
The concept of benchmarking emerged in the United States as a byproduct of strategic planning at Xerox Corporation in 1979. The practice now relates outside of business to many levels of education, from K-12 through postsecondary. Higher education took hold of benchmarking in the early ‘90s, through individual efforts as well as through consortia such as the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), which began its annual endowment study in 1991 to collect institutional-level data.
Jeffrey W. Alstete points out in Benchmarking in Higher Education: Adapting Best Practices to Improve Quality, that benchmarking is highly compatible with higher education because the practice incorporates statistics and data-collection methods, which most faculty understand. Such measurements are critical to managers in postsecondary distance education, whose programs are held to higher standards than traditional education programs.
When used properly, benchmarking is an excellent evaluation tool because it is an ongoing, systematic process that can target areas an organization needs to develop. Factors should be measured regularly over extended periods of time to gauge an institution’s progress toward improvement. A study released last year by Hezel Associates indicated though, that respondents (distance learning administrators) collect data for internal assessment more often than for external benchmarking. Comparing data from similar institutions or programs provides a baseline allowing an institution or an individual program to see where it stands within its community. Both processes are necessary. An institution must understand its own inner workings to make improvements, while the best improvements come from standards based on external references through benchmarking.
“To understand what’s achievable—that’s the key of external benchmarking.” said Richard T. Hezel, president of Hezel Associates. “An institution can easily set a mediocre level of achievement if its administrators only look internally and say ‘We’re doing just fine,’ rather than using data to set new goals.” He believes by knowing the performance levels of other colleges and universities, administrators can begin to see the higher standards that are possible.
When distance-learning programs compete heavily for students, the external reference point becomes important for quality assurance purposes. Many sources say institutions have been benchmarking without knowing it; competing informally with comparable institutions. True benchmarking, according to Rhonda Martin Epper, goes beyond a common community and instead looks across industries as a formal process. This type of cross-industry benchmarking promotes innovation that combats the critics who, Alstete says, believe benchmarking lacks originality.
Consortia and Conduct
Many
institutions participate in benchmarking surveys, benchmarking organizations,
associations involved with benchmarking and individual benchmarking efforts
using moderately-priced, subscription-based tools. Some examples include
the Consortium for Higher Education Benchmarking Analysis (CHEEBA), BearingPoint
Higher Education Benchmarking Consortium and The American Productivity & Quality
Center (APQC). The most recent benchmarking tool, targeted specifically
toward distance learning programs, is IQAT—the Interactive Quality
Assessment Tool—a collaborative effort between the non-profit National
University Telecommunications Network (NUTN) and Hezel Associates. In
addition, APQC, whose members include higher education institutions along
with businesses, has published a “Benchmarking Code of Conduct,” identifying
the process as a serious undertaking in the U.S.
Revealing Best Practices
Best practices emerge from benchmarking when participants identify the
most successful standards and practices among comparison organizations.
Those organizations that surface at the top of certain institutional
factors, such as academic assessment, student support assessment and
student outcomes assessment, set the standard for other institutions. The
process does not entail copying, but encourages inventiveness as an organization
fits the best practice to its own system. IQAT compiles best practices
in a one-stop resource on its Web site. To view relevant best practices
for distance learning, visit www.iqat.org/best_practices.org.
For more information about benchmarking, visit www.hezel.com/benchmarking.
Further References: Rhonda Martin Epper, Applying Benchmarking To Higher Education: Some Lessons from Experience.; Jeffrey W. Alste, Benchmarking in Higher Education: Adapting Best Practices to Improve Quality (ERIC Digest).