Embedded Process for Continuous Improvement: Continuous evaluation and improvement is built into the program design and delivery curriculum.

All of Brandman MyPath’s degree programs are subject to the Program Assessment and Program Review cycle, a dedicated improvement process based on evidence of student learning and success. In addition, during a student’s first year, the University tracks information such as satisfaction and experience with: full-time tutorial faculty and academic coaches, the learning environment and competency design, technology, and areas of strength and improvement. The University also conducts focus groups on an ad hoc basis to gather qualitative student feedback that cannot be gathered through the survey process.

In addition, by reviewing the analytics from the learning system partner, Brandman can review back-end student behavior (e.g. patterns in the interaction with content) and align these findings with external surveys and focus groups. For example, tutorial faculty are able to review the time that students spend in a formative assessment and the number of attempts that students take for formative assessment mastery. That way, the tutorial faculty can identify the topics with which one student or a group of students are struggling. This type of data allows tutorial faculty to proactively reach out to students and provide additional instruction.

These multiple sources inform the foundation of Brandman’s competency-based Student Engagement Index, that will incorporate both the back-end learning system data with front-end surveys, focus groups and touch points with the University’s tutorial faculty and academic coaches. As the University’s competency-based initiative reaches scale, these various data points will help the University define a competency-based Student Engagement Index that can ultimately improve retention and graduation rates for a fully online, self-paced competency-based education model.