EAC Visual Data software renewed at UMBC!

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:38:22 -0500
eac

Join us at TechFest, Bridging Student Learning Outcomes and Success Analytics, and Closing the Loop to learn more!

UMBC's license to the EAC Visual Data software has been renewed for 2018. This product interfaces with our Blackboard learning management system to compile assessment data. Over the past year, Jennifer Harrison, Associate Director for Assessment in the Faculty Development Center, has been working with faculty and departments to program and align their outcomes using EAC. Several departments, including the Honors College, LRC, OUE, MCS, and Psychology are actively using this data. Other programs are working towards using the program, and we would like to encourage more programs to implement this too!

Since EAC is a building block for Blackboard (Bb), the EAC developers have collaborated with Blackboard developers to begin to pull Blackboard Outcomes away from its labor intensive and ineffective secondary-evaluation assessment system towards the next generation of assessment tools. EAC has helped Bb to modify its Goals and Assessments module, so faculty can link outcomes to specific direct measures (i.e., rubrics and tests in Bb), aggregate data in limited ways, and export results aligned to the outcomes.

As part of the NILOA Occasional Paper that Sherri Braxton and Jennifer Harrison co-authored, they reviewed the range of software options that support learning assessment. Although they concluded that current software products do not yet meet the needs of systematized authentic assessment data management, EAC has begun to bridge this gap. For programs that do not use Bb, the FDC has developed tools in Excel to align outcomes and collect data (see the MA in TTL example here).

If your program is interested in using this tool, please contact Jennifer Harrison for more information or to set up a meeting to discuss the assessment goals for your program. Using this program can help ensure that your program has developed and implemented an assessment process to evaluate its overall effectiveness and compliance.

See the FDC and DoIT tutorials for step-by-step instructions on using the software.