Campus Assessment Network
Notes from Meeting of
September 30, 2011
The meeting of the Campus Assessment Network (CAN) was held Friday, September 30, 2011 at
2:00 p.m. in Adams Hall Fireside Room.
Welcome and Introductions
Members were introduced and thanked for their attendance.
Members present:
Carolinda Douglass, Crystal Coppel, Amy Franklin, Angela Branson, Sue Doederlein, Carrie Zack,
Evelyn Comber, Dan House, Deborah Robertson, Shana Stringfellow
Announcements and Updates

HLC Accreditation report will be due in 2013 and we will be having a site visit in 2014. You
will be hearing more about that as it gets closer.

The Assessment Expo will be coming up on Friday, March 23, 2012 in the Sky Room. If
you have any good practice ideas or any nominations please let the group know. Possible
theme is “Good Sustained Practices.”

Helen Barrett will be coming to NIU on Friday, October 21, 2011 to talk about ePortfolios.
There will be two workshops and each one will be broken down into two talks. If you are
interested you can register through the Faculty Development website. If you would like
more info you can go to the Faculty Development website or to the OAS website. Students
are welcome to attend but must register through the OAS.

Toolkit is celebrating its 10th anniversary and is featuring Rubrics in this Fall issue.

SACLO had their first meeting on Wednesday, September 28, 2011. To learn more about
them you can go to the OAS website or check out their Facebook page.
Possible Items for 2011-2012

If you ever have any ideas for topics for a CAN meeting you are always welcome to let us
know.

If you have any ideas for a topic for a Spring speaker please let us know.

Branson who works with the Living Learning Communities would like to identify outcomes
for this community. She is working on a plan for a program to show how we can get from
here to five years down the road. Branson would like to know if there any people at NIU
that could help with this or if anyone has any suggestions of non-NIU people that could
help with this as well. Stringfellow mentioned she attended a presentation at Eastern Illinois
University by Eric Davidson and that he did a wonderful presentation on assessment and he
might be a good person to contact about this. Branson would like to branch away from
surveys and is open to suggestions that anyone may have.

Robertson shared with the group that she loved the first article of the newsletter that the
group was given to read for this meeting. She suggested that it might be a good idea to put
together a simple rubric template for professors to incorporate into their syllabi. Douglass
said she would work with Robertson on this and also get some feedback from SACLO.
Doederlein said she would also like to participate in this. Robertson was asking how we can
mix “professor language” in with the new rubric and “assessment language”. A syllabus
template would be helpful.

Baccalaureate Review – What now? What’s going on? Is a group working on it? Anne
Birberick put together a group and they met last week. There are 17 faculty members on it
and they are working on making rubrics for the 8 learning outcomes and will have drafts
submitted by November 4, 2011. Realistically official rubrics should be available for testing
by January 2012.

Anne Birberick is looking for a new Gen. Ed. Coordinator.
Article Discussion
The article “Reflective (Ac) Counting: Institutional Research, Evaluation, & Assessment in a Time
of Cholera,” by Walter F. Heinecke was read by the group and discussion questions were asked to
the group.

Why do we feel like we are in crisis in higher education? The group responded to the
question by saying funding/financial crisis, we measure what is easy to measure and the state
measures what it values.

Numbers as stories? What stories do we tell? What stories do we tell with the numbers that
we have? The group responded by saying that the numbers can tell a much bigger story that
what you see right away. Depending on how data are used can depend on what answer they
get and asking the wrong questions and not even knowing it.
Meeting was adjourned at 3:30 pm.