Assessment of student learning remains one of the most cited areas of concern or need for improvement for higher education institutions across accreditors. Within that space, assessment for student affairs and co-curricular areas is one of the top areas lacking among institutional practices.
Seemingly an evergreen challenge is the lack of resources and knowledge of student affairs assessment. For these reasons and more, the Student Affairs Assessment Leaders (SAAL) continue to invest and promote their free massive open online course (MOOC), Applying & Leading Assessment in Student Affairs.
The course has run once a year for the past eight years and consistently sees over 90% course quality ratings. Indication materials and activities also had a positive impact on them. It averages more than 1,500 participants per year and consistently brings in more folks due to the relevance of the material paired with the lack of resources and guidance available at institutions for faculty, staff and administrators on the subject. A free, self-paced, introductory course with an abundance of resources and practical activities to ground the material has proven successfully popular and useful to thousands of people.
Each year, Joe Levy – who serves as the Open Course Manager for the SAAL Board of Directors – conducts analysis from course participant results and feedback on the course experience. This serves as a great recap of the course experience for the year, as well as implications for changes to influence the next iteration of the course.
This blog provides a summary of the data analysis and results from the 2024 open course that ran from February to April of 2024. The reporting resulted in 96 total pages, opening with a 5-page executive summary and followed by reports for the Welcome Survey/User Profile, Quiz Results, Assignment Rubric Results and User Experience/End of Course Survey Results. The executive summary has hyperlinks to these respective reports and data disaggregation elements summarized.
Key Takeaways: Enrollment
This year, we saw 1958 participants enroll in the course, with 350 of them successfully completing the course. This resulted in a 17.875% completion rate. This rate exceeds the 14.4% completion rate from last year and the 15% completion rates from 2021 and 2022. It’s actually the fourth highest completion rate in the eight years running the course! In addition to the higher completion rate, we saw over 400 more participants sign up this year compared to last; our third highest enrollment in the history of the course!
Welcome Survey/User Profile
Participants are largely hearing about the course from friends of colleagues, from SAAL/sponsors or from the instructor. They take the course because they enjoy learning about topics that interest them and hope to gain skills for a promotion or new career. While they have online experience from school or through various MOOC providers, course takers are relatively split on being passive or active participants for this course and they anticipate spending 1-2 hours per week on the course.
Majority of course takers have 40% or less of their jobs dedicated to assessment and identify as intermediate or beginners with respect to their assessment competency. They hold various roles at institutions, with large concentrations as staff, managers/directors, administrators and faculty. They work in functional areas across the institution, with large concentrations in institutional effectiveness, career and academic advising, auxiliary and administrative services, along with student engagement and involvement. They attend from all types of institutions but the largest concentrations are in public 4-year over 10,000, private 4-year under 10,000 and community college under 10,000. While we have course takers from all over the world, the vast majority are from North America, nearly half in suburban residential communities and the vast majority of participants speak English as their native language.
Course participants typically have master’s degrees, the next largest group has terminal degrees. The course welcomed all ages of participants (from 19 to 74), with the average reported age of 46 for all respondents and 45 for completers, with the most frequently reported ages being 42 for all respondents and 29 for completers. Course participants are majority female and the majority identify as women. While many races and ethnicities are represented, the majority of participants identified as White, followed by African-American/Black and Hispanic/Latinx.
Since course completers had a very similar demographic distribution/profile as the initial sample of survey respondents, the above narrative profile holds true for them, too. These results also largely mirror the results from last year. Details and comparison information can be found in the Welcome Survey Results 2024 section of the report.
