Accountability

As Congress finally passes the sweeping college legislation, 5 years late, views on its significance and potential impact vary widely.

This presentation will demonstrate how one organization (the university library) has employed technology to develop a comprehensive, integrated, and participatory approach to accountability. Beginning with an overview of the imperative for accountability, the presentation will use the program's open source technology to demonstrate how accountability reinforces planning, decision making, service quality, and resource development and allocation.

This session will focus on activities that began with the Spellings Commission and have continued with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, as well as the responses by various publics along the way. Additionally, expectations of one regional accreditation agency in the area of accountability will be discussed.

In responding to internal and external pressures for accountability in higher education, especially in the areas of improved learning outcomes and student success, IT leaders may soon become critical partners with academic and student affairs. IT can contribute to this call for accountability through academic analytics, which is emerging as a new tool for a new era. This session will explore the emerging field of academic analytics and its potential impact on the institution and IT units. John Campbell will share the potential of analytics, explore the role of IT in analytics projects, highlight some early projects, and close with some considerations for building an analytics project on campus and potential policy concerns. The session will be based on an article [PDF 601 KB] published in the July/August 2007 EDUCAUSE Review by John Campbell, Peter DeBlois, and Diana Oblinger.

This research bulletin presents a framework for the effective, ongoing, sustainable funding of IT infrastructure in universities and colleges. The framework articulates the composition of IT infrastructure and derives a cost model for provision of infrastructure services. The model is intended to be straightforward, enabling ready adoption, while also providing flexibility so that it can be updated on a periodic basis to reflect changing technological demand and supply conditions.

The author discusses two of EDUCAUSE's grand challenges access and accountability, as well as a third one he finds just as important, assessment.

As colleges and universities respond to the public demand for greater accountability in the form of documented learning outcomes and increased student retention, the emerging practice of academic analytics can create actionable intelligence for higher education institutions.

"As Congress and the U.S. Education Department contemplate whether and how to force colleges to publish significantly more information about their performance, two associations of public universities are forging ahead with their own plan for a voluntary accountability system under which institutions would release data about student learning outcomes that most of them have not typically made public. And the major association of private colleges on Monday offered a look at its own accountability template, which would give institutions much more leeway about what they report about their students’ classroom success. "

Leadership in IT requires a focus on current technology innovation, adoption, and impact on learning, but most important, leadership in IT requires understanding the alignment of external factors—access, affordability, perceived quality—to the core mission and integrity of the institution.