Organization and Special Features of the Self-Study
This self-study has two features that differentiate it from most self-studies developed for accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association: First, it is a special emphases self-study; and second, it is presented in electronic form on the World Wide Web, as part of the electronic institutional portfolio that IUPUI has been developing since 1998. These two features have strongly influenced the content, organization, and style of the narrative sections, as well as the process of preparing the self-study.
The NCA Handbook of Accreditation defines a special emphasis self-study as "an option for accredited, established, well-functioning institutions that are willing to commit serious attention to a select group of critical issues in order to contribute to institutional improvement and educational excellence." The Handbook goes on to note that "The accreditation process is revitalized for some institutions when they seize this opportunity to build their self-study processes around a small number of carefully selected critical areas in which they want to improve or excel."
Teaching and Learning and Civic Engagement represent two areas in which IUPUI aims "to improve or excel." Over the past two years we have revised our Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals and developed a new strategic plan that renews our commitment to these two key components of our mission. The special emphasis self-studies take stock of what we have accomplished in these areas and solicit the advice of our consultant-evaluators concerning ways in which we can carry our work forward into the future most effectively within the context of our mission and goals. We are grateful to the Higher Learning Commission for allowing us to pursue the special emphases option.
The self-study is primarily Web-based and is included in IUPUI"s online "institutional portfolio" at www.iport.iupui.edu. IUPUI has been engaged in developing this portfolio for the past four years. Much like an individual faculty member"s teaching portfolio or a student"s learning portfolio, the institutional portfolio provides a site and an occasion for reflection, self-analysis, and improvement. Much of the substance and evidence we present for the self-study is available only on the Web site, which is not a supplement to the narrative, but rather the main product of our collective self-study efforts. We hope it will provide both a more solid foundation of evidence for the self-study and a clearer, richer portrait of the campus than a paper self-study might accommodate. The use of the Web for the self-study is something of an experiment both for IUPUI and the Higher Learning Commission. We will be very interested in comments from our consultant-evaluators on the effectiveness of using the Web as a self-study medium.
Our special emphasis self-studies have been circulated widely among faculty, students, and staff as well as community stakeholders, and we have incorporated input from all these sectors. In preparing our narratives for the Criteria for Accreditation, we have focused on "making the case" that we fulfill the Criteria. These narratives are relatively brief and while they include information gathered from across the campus, have been subject to less extensive discussion and review than the two special emphasis studies. In addition, all of the self-study"s narrative sections were written with the assumption that they would be read on-line; readers will find frequent references to "this section of the Web site," "menus," and other language reflecting the development of these narratives as components of a complex Web site.
Special Emphases
IUPUI"s recently revised mission statement and current strategic planning effort focus on three principal elements: excellence in teaching and learning; excellence in research, scholarship and creative activity; and excellence in civic engagement. While higher education institutions and their stakeholders have formed some consensus on the characteristics and indicators of excellence in research, our understanding of the nature of excellence in teaching and learning and in civic engagement is still evolving. By exploring these two latter aspects of our mission in our self-study, we hope to contribute to this developing understanding, with a strong focus on our specific urban setting, context, and challenges, and with the aim of continuing to strengthen our institution"s effectiveness in these key areas as the strategic plan challenges us to do.
The self-study thus considers our accomplishments and effectiveness in relation to our strategic goals and objectives in the areas of teaching and learning and civic engagement, using evidence derived from assessment to determine areas of strength and areas needing improvement. We also consider the usefulness of our current assessment and improvement practices for providing the evidence we need to determine effectiveness in meeting the goals and objectives in the new strategic plan. Where necessary, we identify needs to change these practices in order to guide improvement within the framework of the plan.
Teaching and Learning
Throughout its brief 33-year history, and especially over the past ten years, IUPUI has focused intensively on developing strategies to provide the most effective education possible for our students, consistent with our commitment to serving educational needs and raising educational attainment in Indianapolis, Central Indiana, and throughout the state. Promoting student learning and success by developing new structures, programs, and initiatives responsive to the needs of our student body-which comprises a diverse and nontraditional mix-has been the central emphasis of our efforts.
To that end, we have revised undergraduate curricula and pedagogical strategies campus-wide to focus more explicitly and coherently on supporting students" development of an agreed-upon set of higher-order skills and abilities. We have established a new University College dedicated to helping entering students make a successful transition to college-level work. We have created new student life programs, instituted new learning support centers, and worked to foster an inclusive and supportive climate and improved physical environment for learning. Faculty development programs have been expanded and reorganized; the Center for Teaching and Learning and its parent office, the Office of Professional Development, have supported implementation of innovative and effective curricular and pedagogical strategies, collaborated with other offices and initiatives aimed at supporting student learning and success, and disseminated proven best practices for teaching and learning across the campus.
These new efforts and initiatives have been guided and informed by evidence derived from assessment. Building on earlier assessment initiatives, IUPUI began a new Office of Planning and Institutional Improvement (PAII) in 1992; under the auspices of PAII, a campus-wide Program Review and Assessment Committee (PRAC) was founded in 1993 with representation from every IUPUI school, as well as those administrative units with responsibility for supporting student learning and success. Current membership includes University College, as well as representatives of the University Library, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Student Life and Diversity. PRAC serves as the main oversight body for assessment of student learning in the individual schools and across the IUPUI campus and has been the principal campus group working on the development of the special emphasis self-study on Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This self-study is based in part on the assessment work in which the PRAC representatives and their schools or offices have been engaged over the past nine years.
During the 2001-2002 academic year, PRAC worked to develop a broad picture of the effectiveness of teaching and learning across campus through a series of oral reports presented by each school. Amplifying and extending the written reports submitted annually by each school, the oral reports considered assessment findings in relation to key learning outcomes, uses being made of those findings, and needs for improvement, including improvement of assessment approaches and support for assessment work. Using the information gathered from these reports, along with evidence from other sources, including the Office of Information Management and Institutional Research and other current and recent campus-wide assessment and improvement initiatives, PRAC and the self-study Steering Committee evaluated the effectiveness of IUPUI"s efforts to achieve excellence in teaching and learning in relation to the goals, objectives, and indicators in the new strategic plan. That plan also provided guidance for the development of the "Strengths and Challenges" section toward the end of learning and teaching self-study. The self-study concludes with a set of questions to our accreditation review team members, soliciting their advice on directions we might pursue in light of the findings of the self-study and the aspirations articulated in the strategic plan.
Civic Engagement
As an urban public university situated in Indiana"s largest city, IUPUI has long considered engagement with Indianapolis, Central Indiana, and the entire state as a major component of its mission. As we define it, "civic engagement" spans the traditional categories of teaching, research, and service. Faculty conduct research aimed at improving the quality of life in Indianapolis and in cities and communities nationally and internationally; faculty and staff apply their professional expertise to work in and with communities and their members in Indianapolis and around the world; and students contribute to and learn from the city through service and other experiential learning in a range of community agencies and organizations, as well as in business and industry. The IUPUI Center for Service and Learning has a campus-wide mission to support and encourage civic engagement efforts, especially in the areas of service learning and professional service. Major interdisciplinary centers, such as the Center on Philanthropy, the Center on Urban Policy and the Environment, the Polis Center, and the Center for Earth and Environmental Science play key roles in advancing this component of the campus mission. In addition, a number of schools on the IUPUI campus include centers, institutes, and other units with civic engagement, service learning, and professional service missions.
The current strategic planning effort has reaffirmed the centrality of "excellence in civic engagement" to IUPUI"s mission and institutional identity. Accordingly, a representative Civic Engagement Task Force was established in Fall 2000 to bring greater focus and effectiveness to civic engagement at IUPUI. Led by the director of the Center for Service and Learning, the task force has developed goals, objectives, strategies, and indicators of effectiveness for civic engagement at IUPUI, and continues to work on mechanisms for assessing progress toward those goals. This task force has had the principal responsibility for developing the special emphasis self-study on civic engagement.
As part of its efforts, the Civic Engagement Task Force has developed Web-based questionnaires that query deans about school-level civic engagement initiatives, including patient and client services offered by professional schools. The deans" responses supplement information that individual faculty members provide on their own civic engagement activities in their annual summary reports. It is important to understand that we aim to go beyond merely "counting" or inventorying civic engagement initiatives in our approaches to assessing our civic engagement work. To enhance the effectiveness of civic engagement at IUPUI, we hope to improve our capacity and support structures for civic engagement, to become more adept at involving community collaborators as full partners in our efforts, and to develop more systematic approaches to assessing our capacity to support civic engagement, as well as the impact of civic engagement activities on community, student, and faculty stakeholders. Data collected from the deans" questionnaire, which we plan to administer annually, the annual faculty reports, and other information gathered in past years, provided much of the material for the civic engagement self-study and allowed the task force to draw conclusions about strengths and challenges and to develop a set of questions for NCA reviewers about our work within the framework of the strategic plan.
Given the absence of any broadly accepted model for defining and assessing effectiveness in the area of civic engagement, we hope that the approach we are developing will be widely applicable to other institutions. Our visiting team members will be asked to review the current status of this ongoing initiative and to recommend ways to improve the strategies, indicators, and assessment practices we are developing to accomplish our goal of achieving excellence in civic engagement.
The IUPUI Electronic Institutional Portfolio
Background
From July 1998 to June 2001, IUPUI collaborated with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and with five other large, public, urban universities on the Urban Universities Portfolio Project (UUPP), an initiative supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. Each of the six institutions in the project developed its own prototype for an electronic, Web-based institutional portfolio focused on effectiveness in mission-critical areas. The portfolios bring together authentic examples of student and faculty work, authentic examples of academic and administrative processes (such as planning, curriculum development, and assessment), assessment findings, and performance indicators and data, all framed by narrative description, interpretation, and reflection, to demonstrate accountability and effectiveness. While the portfolios were by no means "finished" after three years, institutions in the project found that the work of conceptualizing and constructing the portfolios, identifying and generating evidence of effectiveness within the framework of mission, and interpreting and reflecting on that evidence has catalyzed more systematic efforts to define, assess, and improve institutional effectiveness in mission-critical areas.
An important aim of the UUPP was to experiment with using new media to do a better job of communicating with stakeholders about the work that takes place at our institutions and about our effectiveness and responsiveness to stakeholder needs in carrying out our missions, with a strong emphasis on student learning and success. At IUPUI, our hope from the beginning of the project was to use our portfolio as a new type of accreditation self-study, one that harnesses the ability of technology to communicate in multiple media-audio, video, and graphics, in addition to written narrative-and that allows us to use these media to capture a wider variety of evidence, especially primary materials and authentic performances by students and faculty, than would be possible in a paper-only format. The portfolio uses hyperlinking to connect and contextualize information, evidence, and examples in new ways, along with multiple pathways and interactive features that allow users to zero in on specific information.
The self-study narrative provides a pathway through the portfolio materials for NCA reviewers and other interested stakeholders. Ultimately, that narrative will be one of several paths through the portfolio as we draw on the material contained within the site for multiple purposes. Following the NCA review, we plan to develop our annual performance report, currently distributed on paper to Indianapolis community leaders, state legislators, members of the IU Board of Trustees and IUPUI Board of Advisors, and people and offices across the IUPUI campus, within the portfolio, making information on our performance available on the Web 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Overview of the Self-Study
We have developed our self-study within the IUPUI electronic institutional portfolio. New sections of the portfolio were created to address the Higher Learning Commission"s General Institutional Requirements and Criteria for Accreditation, with links to sections of the portfolio and other IUPUI Web sites that provide relevant supporting evidence, examples, documentation, and discussion. We have also built new evidence and narrative interpretation and discussion into the portfolio to support our claim that IUPUI fulfills the GIRs and Criteria for Accreditation. There is some overlap between the Criteria and our special emphases self-studies; the efficiency of the Web has been extremely helpful to us in accommodating this overlap through cross-referenced links among materials and evidence related to both the special emphases and the Criteria.
For each of the five criteria, we have developed a short essay aimed at making the case that IUPUI meets the criterion. The five essays are available on paper and on the IUPUI portfolio Web site in both .pdf (i.e., designed for easy print-out) and HTML formats. The HTML versions of the essays include links to detailed evidence, reports, policies, and other important information contained elsewhere in the portfolio or on the main IUPUI campus Web site. We strongly recommend that team members review these HTML documents and linked materials: together, we believe, they provide a richer, more complete picture of the institution than traditional paper self-studies and their appendices. At the same time, the direct links between the narrative self-study and back-up materials are intended to make it easier for reviewers to manage the voluminous amounts of information that self-study appendices normally include and to connect this information with the relevant sections of the self-study.
Similarly, each of the two special emphases portions of the self-study includes an overview essay describing the initiative under study, discussing its current status, summarizing assessment methods and findings, critiquing our progress, and defining areas where we would especially appreciate advice from the review team. As with the criteria, these essays are available both on paper and on the portfolio site in .pdf and HTML formats, with links to supporting materials and illustrative examples in the HTML versions.
Current Status of the Self-Study/Portfolio
In preparing for the NCA review, we have considerably revised the IUPUI portfolio to improve the navigability of the site, created an entry point for reviewers, added new evidence, examples, and background information, and developed the narrative portions of the self-study, in conjunction with the relevant offices and committees. The self-study portion of the portfolio Web site, which can be found at www.iport.iupui.edu, includes links to the narrative components of the self-study, minutes of committees that worked on the self-study, and links to evidence and background materials. It also includes such resources as a search function, a glossary of IUPUI acronyms used in the narratives, a list of important IUPUI Web sites with links to those sites, and an "ask a question/make a comment" feature.
Work on the teaching and learning special emphasis has, in effect, been under development from the outset of our portfolio initiative, since a priority of the IUPUI portfolio from the beginning has been to demonstrate our students" learning and our ongoing efforts to assess and improve learning. We have continued to build this section of the Web site, with the hyperlinked self-study narrative designed to serve as a pathway guiding our review team members through this area of the site. Development of the Civic Engagement portion of the site is at an earlier stage and ultimately will be enriched by data generated from new electronic annual faculty reports and questionnaires for deans piloted over the past year, as well as additional assessment findings and relevant examples and evidence. In this case, again, the narrative is designed to lead reviewers through the portfolio, analyzing and interpreting the information, evidence, and examples that the portfolio includes.
Overall review and guidance for the self-study have been provided by the Future Group, the representative body that developed our new strategic plan. A smaller working group served as the Steering Committee that guided day-to-day work on developing the self-study. As explained above, PRAC coordinated the special emphasis self-study on Excellence in Teaching and Learning, while the Civic Engagement Task Force played that role for the self-study on Excellence in Civic Engagement. As the self-study developed, faculty governance groups and other faculty committees, including members of the Portfolio Implementation Committee that guided initial work on the IUPUI portfolio, the IUPUI Board of Advisors, Chancellor"s Cabinet, Deans" Council, student groups, and staff governance have been consulted and invited to provide input.
Paper and Electronic Resources for the Team Visit
On behalf of the various groups and committees involved in the self-study, the Steering Committee is providing our NCA review team with a paper document that includes the essays on the two special emphases, our responses to the GIRs, the essays developed for each of the five criteria, the Basic Institutional Data Forms, and several additional documents that we hope will provide helpful guidance, such as a Glossary of Acronyms and a Guide to the IUPUI Portfolio. Most material normally included in paper appendices is linked to the portfolio Web site, and we have chosen not to duplicate these materials on paper. Similarly, our document room will include primarily materials not available or difficult to digest on the Web. During the accreditation visit itself, each team member who does not have his or her own laptop will be provided with one. In addition, the team"s principal meeting room will be equipped to allow all members to connect to the Internet and view the portfolio during their discussions.
