A Truly Academic Approach to Learning Outcomes

Starting now, colleges and universities have a new choice for attending to student learning outcomes: standards-based evaluation of student achievement. This is a consistent way to accurately document what students are actually and already achieving in regular college settings, according to standards, and now that this approach is system-supported, it is also an easy way to manage outcomes assessment.

Judging this approach and other common assessment methods according to a variety of important criteria reveals that this new approach is far better because it scores especially high on the academic principles that faculty care about: faculty ownership, academic freedom, attending directly to coursework and its evaluation, maintaining academic standards across-the-curriculum, and student accountability for actual achievement. In addition, the eLumen Collaborative approach is easy to use, generates quality data, and substantially enhances organizational capabilities.

eLumen Collaborative directly supports standards-based evaluation of student achievement:

• Faculty-driven
• Learning-centered
• Standards-based
• System-supported
• Incrementally-introduced
  

Here, finally, is a way that colleges can systematically focus on student learning.

-- John Tagg
author, The Learning Paradigm College, speaking about eLumen Collaborative