WebCT unveils first-of-its-kind program harnessing e-learning data to drive education excellence

Quality Assessment Innovation Project will help WebCT Vista institutions collect, organize, analyze and assess data about student learning activities

LYNNFIELD, Mass., April 18, 2005 - WebCT, provider of higher education's most flexible and widely used e-learning solutions, today announced the Quality Assessment Innovation Project, a first-of-its-kind initiative to help colleges and universities improve education by analyzing the student performance data they collect in the WebCT Vista academic enterprise system. The project builds on WebCT's announcement earlier this year of the WebCT Vista PowerSight Kit, software for harvesting institutional data on e-learning.
The four participating institutions in the Quality Assessment Innovation Project will use WebCT Vista's PowerSight Kit to extract data on student activities, compare it against student achievements, synthesize it with other campus data, and leverage it for accreditation and program improvement. WebCT's goal in creating this project is to encourage and expedite innovation in higher education and to make it easy for institutions to measure their results. Each participating institution will partner with WebCT to execute a project using its own data, collected in its WebCT Vista implementation.
The first project participants are:
City University (London), sponsor: Dr. Susannah Quinsee, head of e-Learning and associate director of library information services;
The University System of Georgia Board of Regents, sponsors: Dr. Catherine Finnegan, associate director of assessment and public information; and Associate Professor Libby V. Morris, Ph.D., graduate coordinator for doctoral programs in higher education at the Institute of Higher Education, The University of Georgia;
Santa Barbara (Calif.) City College, sponsor: Andreea Serban, Ph.D., associate vice president, information resources, director of institutional assessment, research and planning; and
Weber State University (Utah), sponsor: Dr. Kathleen Lukken, associate provost.
The WebCT Vista PowerSight Kit gives institutions unprecedented access to the untapped wealth of detailed quantitative data about student learning that the academic enterprise system automatically collects when learners participate in the online course environment. The kit is part of WebCT Vista and will soon be available as a module for the WebCT Campus Edition course management system.

Under the Quality Assessment Innovation Project, The University System of Georgia will use PowerSight-collected data in two ways: to prove students' technology literacy to accreditors and to evaluate the effectiveness of the university system's eCore curriculum. USG will be able to supplement data the WebCT PowerSight Kit collects with records in its student information system and surveys.

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