Watermark Releases Innovative New Assessment Planning & Accreditation Solution at AALHE

SAINT PAUL, Minn., June 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Watermark, a pioneer in educational intelligence, is launching its latest solution, Watermark Planning & Self-Study today at the 2019 Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) Conference - an annual gathering for assessment practitioners in higher education. Representing the best of what the company has learned about planning, assessment, and accreditation from institutional partners over its combined history, Watermark Planning & Self-Study helps institutions more easily collect and report on assessment planning efforts across departments, programs, and colleges to meet goals for continuous improvement and accreditation.

Watermark Planning & Self-Study centralizes planning, program review, and accreditation reporting processes, directly connects planning and assessment data, and integrates with other campus data sources. Its release sets the stage for upcoming planning capabilities and additional product releases to Watermark's educational intelligence platform.

The solution is built on the new Watermark Platform, which features a powerful data architecture that allows an institution to leverage its data from external sources and across the platform. Watermark's educational intelligence platform will combine many of today's campus point systems to streamline processes, break down data silos, and empower institutions to make evidence-based decisions that improve outcomes. A number of institutions have already adopted Watermark Planning & Self-Study to support their institutional assessment and improvement efforts.

"With Planning & Self-Study, we're able to streamline our planning and answer essential questions about the success of our programs and courses. We can advance our current processes in order to get at the kind of data and reporting that will be beneficial in planning and improvement," said Dr. Linda Townsend, Director of Assessment, Longwood University.

"With easy set-up and built-in guidance for faculty, program coordinators, and department chairs, we are able to collaborate better within and across programs, further develop sustainable strategies, and increase both faculty engagement and transparency around our goals, measurements, and results. All of these efforts will drive meaningful improvements across the institution and help us more easily document those improvements for accreditors," noted Townsend.

In addition to leveraging an innovative architectural foundation, Planning & Self-Study offers unique capabilities, including:

• Intelligent curriculum mapping
• Longitudinal and roll-up reporting on outcomes and measures
• Results management and action planning tools to close the loop
• The ability to generate a self-study for regional accreditation

Unlike other planning solutions, Watermark Planning & Self-Study links assessment planning directly to classroom data for better reflection and action planning. Users can align outcomes to courses in an intelligent curriculum map - which populates alignments between courses and outcomes based on measures created in planning - and directly link course data at even the section level to assessment plans. With streamlined views of results and past actions, administrators can roll up assessment data from multiple courses to determine progress against a measure and report on institutional learning outcomes across various courses and programs. Longitudinal reporting allows administrators to view outcome trends over time and easily compare across planning cycles on progress toward goals, types of measures, and actions taken.

With these capabilities, an institution can more easily track where and how outcomes are being assessed, pinpoint gaps in curriculum, identify and monitor the effectiveness of improvement actions, and ensure assessment plans continue to improve each cycle - all while being able to generate a regional accreditation report from this work within a single, centralized system.

"We want to support colleges and universities in fostering a positive culture of assessment and increasing engagement. With Watermark Planning & Self-Study and the educational intelligence platform upon which it's built, we're focused on tackling core issues around data integration with other systems and supporting greater reporting and analytics. We're intent on giving administrators and faculty better-connected data and the insights needed to make evidence-based decisions that improve outcomes across all levels of the institution," said Kevin Michielsen, Watermark's CEO.

Watermark currently supports over 1,700 higher education institutions with its innovative solutions for assessment, ePortfolios, faculty activity reporting, course evaluations, institutional surveys, as well as curriculum and catalog management. Since 2017, Watermark has grown significantly through bringing together market-leading higher education technology providers in support of a shared vision for improving learning through educational intelligence.

Watermark is introducing Planning & Self-Study with special events at AALHE this week. To learn more about how Watermark can support your student and institutional outcomes, visit www.watermarkinsights.com.

About Watermark
Watermark's mission is to put better data into the hands of administrators, faculty, and students everywhere in order to empower them to connect information and gain insights which will drive meaningful improvements. Through its innovative educational intelligence system, Watermark supports institutions in developing an intentional approach to learning and development based on data they can trust. For more information, visit www.watermarkinsights.com.

Contact:
Victoria Guzzo
Director of Corporate Communications
[email protected] 

SOURCE Watermark

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