This past week I attended the AACU conference in Atlanta where I presented on the DQP work in Oregon.  The conference was a busy one (and Atlanta was much colder than I had expected) so there was little time or motivation to see much of the city, but I did follow the concierge’s recommendations on restaurants and enjoyed getting out at least for excellent lunch and dinner breaks.

The Oregon DQP project (https://oregondqp.lanecc.edu/ ) is a three-year, Lumina grant-funded collaboration among the 17 community colleges and 7 universities that started last Sept. I was principal author and co-PI on the project with Connie Green President of Tillamook Bay Community College.

The DQP work nationally aims to help ensure quality doesn’t suffer as we work to meet increasing completion demands. It does this by creating a framework for learning outcomes so we can more precisely describe what a degree means, whether it’s a two-year, four-year or at the Master’s level.

This descriptive framework has five dimensions or competencies: Specialized Knowledge, Broad Integrative Knowledge, Intellectual Skills, Applied Learning and Civic Learning. In my comments I addressed one of the more attractive aspects of the DQP for Oregon, which is the visually intuitive representation for mapping degrees to the framework, using what are referred to as “Spider Diagrams” for different types of degrees and different specific disciplines.

The primary hallway chatter at the conference centered on a recent NILOA article published by Peter Ewell, one of the original authors of the DQP with an afterword authored by Carol Geary Schneider.  This 33-page pdf, http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/EwellDQPop1.pdf, focuses on the DQP and implications for assessment.

That’s all for now – if you get the opportunity to look at the national and Oregon DQP work I think you’ll find it both enjoyable and energizing.

Tagged: AACU, DQP, Oregon, Sonya Christian