Dear Faculty and Staff,
I’m pleased to announce that more materials have been added to the QEP Planning Resources weblink on the College website. To access these materials, please go to the Bethune-Cookman College homepage, and click on Academics at top of the page. A page will open up which has tabs on the left-hand side. If you then click on the SACS link, you’ll arrive at a page that has QEP planning materials at bottom.
This resource page contains materials available to faculty, staff, students, and administrators as Bethune-Cookman College creates its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for the 2010 Southern Association of Colleges (SACS) re-accreditation visit.
As part of its expectations for each 10-year re-accreditation cycle, SACS is now requesting that all member institutions develop a QEP. The QEP should provide a plan for each member institution to enhance student learning in a clearly defined area of the college’s curriculum and institutional life. Each QEP should identify strategic student learning outcomes to be measured in the QEP project, should demonstrate careful planning and the involvement of as many stakeholders as possible, and should articulate a process whereby the results of the QEP assessment measures will be shared with stakeholders and used to improve institutional performance.
At Bethune-Cookman College, a planning group, the Institutional Effectiveness Committee (IEC), comprised of faculty, staff, and administrators, was at work throughout the 2005-2006 academic year to begin developing a QEP for the College’s 2010 SACS visit. By the end of the academic year, the IEC had identified three key areas of concern as possible QEP topics: 1) the first-year experience; 2) leadership and civic engagement; and 3) writing across the curriculum.
To begin involving the faculty at a wider level, the IEC asked that the Fall 2006 Faculty-Staff Institute be dedicated to the discussion of the QEP. An outside consultant, Dr. Caula Beyl of Alabama A & M University, was brought in to present a workshop on QEP planning to all faculty and key administrators. At the end of this workshop, faculty were broken into workgroups to discuss the three topics. When the faculty reconvened, each group presented a rationale for one of the three topics, and all those in attendance voted on the topics.
The result of this dialogic process was that the faculty chose the first-year experience as the QEP topic. As the IEC worked to refine the topic at the beginning of the fall semester 2006), the topic chosen was defined as “Fostering a Culture of Leadership and Civic Engagement among First-Year Students at Bethune-Cookman College.”
Once the topic had been identified and clearly defined, the IEC formed workgroups to begin composing each section of the QEP. Each workgroup has been charged to work throughout the fall semester 2006 on its section of the QEP, and to involve faculty, staff, and students in the writing and discussion process.
The QEP planning resources are being offered to the College community as the QEP writing process is underway. As further resources are identified in the course of the QEP writing process, they will be uploaded to this weblink, with announcements to the College community. Other resources, which will be arranged according to topics including “Assessment,” “Learning Outcomes,” “Student Learning,” etc. will be uploaded to this site in the near future by CIT. Please visit the weblink regularly to discover updates, and as we add new materials, we will notify the campus family on a regular basis.
Suggestions about this resource link and about other resources to include are welcome, and may be sent to Dr. Hiram Powell, Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs, at
powellh@cookman.edu.
