This assessment help and resources side of my website will serve as a go-to hub of information about student learning assessment for faculty and student affairs staff who are involved in assessment plans and projects. Visitors will be able to learn about me, my credentials, and my work, as well as how to plan, execute, and report on student learning assessment for their academic and/or student affairs programs.
The target audience for the assessment help and resources side of my website are are faculty and staff (primarily from Stephens College) who require training and/or resources to help with their assessment plans. The type of faculty I'm targeting with this website are perhaps new faculty who have never conducted assessment before, faculty who were originally industry professionals and do not have an academic background, an faculty who have done assessment before but require training on new methods. The type of staff I am targeting are student affairs professionals, and instructional staff.
The audience will consist of adult learners of all genders between the ages of 23 and 69. In the early stages of the site, the users will access the site primarily from Columbia, Missouri. However, as the site grows a gains a wider audience, visitors will consist of academics from around the nation or perhaps the world. The site will require minimal computer skills for the basic modules and learning resources (e.g., if you can check your e-mail you can navigate the site). However, the more advanced modules and resources such as data analysis, will require a bit more experience (e.g., Microsoft Excel). Finally, the site will contain material for all levels of assessment practice, from those who are brand new and never done it before, to seasoned faculty who have gone through several assessment cycles.
To address the assessment help and resources side of the website, ten Stephens College employees were administered a survey. Four of those employees were brought in for follow up interviews.
The preliminary survey was sent to six faculty and four Student Development staff via Qualtrics. The questions included likert scales asking respondents to agree with statements about the utility of an "Assessment Help" website. They were then asked to identify topics they would like to learn about and resources they would like to have. Additionally, they ranked the top three features they would like to see in an online assessment help resource. The results of the survey were used to formulate the follow-up interview questions.
Survey Items
Survey Results
Four of the employees (2 faculty and 2 staff) participated in a follow up interview where they were asked:
What types of assessment planning templates or forms would you like to see?The following websites contain elements that I'd like to incorporate into the site, as well as some to avoid:
The content will be organized as follows:
The site is designed using a hierarchical structure, because each page is organized using sub-categories. For example, the training and tutorials page will contain modules on the learning assessment cycle, which is in turn broken down by step. Additionally, the rubric section will be sub-categorized into type of rubric, and so on. The home page will serve as a map to the user, where they are able to choose which page they want to navigate to. Each page will provide a menu to allow seamless navigation within the section, as well as contain a main navigation menu at the top and bottom of the page, so that the user may switch to another part of the site without the need to navigate back to the home page. A page that links to some kind of media (e.g., a video or PDF resource) will open the link in a new tab. This will allow the user to keep the main information page open while viewing a helpful resource. Any content that requires more than three screen lengths to view will be chunked into multiple pages complete with "Next" buttons to navigate the user sequentially through the material.
Each page will contain the following content:
Assessment Tutorials
Rubric Repository
Templates and Forms
Helpful Resources
All media used on this site will be documents and resources created by me or used with permission. The rubrics posted will be used with written permission from the authors, and any images used will be either created or taken by me. The Stephens College intellectual property policy states I retain the rights to anything I create using college resources as long as the college is able to access it and use it for its own purposes. Any links to articles or books will link the user to external databases and sites where they may purchase the source. Unless the source is publically available, it will not link to PDFs directly.
Because this website will begin as a resource for Stephens College faculty and staff, the colors scheme will reflect the school's colors or traditional maroon and gold. In recent years, the college has added additional colors to it's scheme. The Stephens marketing and style guide dictates a strict adherance to a specific set of colors provide in the pantone color scale. These colors have been converted to hex (see below).