Developing Assessment Plans that Work

Workshops to help your faculty use assessment to improvement teaching and learning

 

Offered by:

Dr. Ron Miller and Dr. Barbara Olds

Colorado School of Mines

Office of Special Programs and Continuing Education

Workshop Program

We offer workshops at your institution ranging from 1/2 to 3 days to help your faculty develop and implement effective and efficient assessment plans for improving learning in your classrooms and degree programs.  Our workshop focus can be custom-crafted to fit the needs of your faculty at the classroom, program, or institutional levels.
For further information concerning our assessment workshops, please contact:

CSM Office of Special Programs

Workshop Topic Areas

Workshop topics and activities can cover can any of all of the following topics:

  • overview of the assessment process

  • developing measurable program objectives

  • assessment methods that work

  • making sense of assessment data

  • designing effective ways to close the feedback loop

  • how to sustain the process

  • how to keep faculty engaged in the process

Workshop Format

Our workshops are informal but structured to minimize lecture time; effective active learning techniques are utilized to maximize participant interaction and learning.  We have many years of experience in classroom teaching and workshop delivery.

If you're involved with outcomes assessment and would like to improve the assessment activities at your institution, contact us.  We will be happy to discuss your assessment needs and formulate a workshop plan that works for you. 

Workshop Facilitators

Dr. Ronald L. Miller is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines where he has taught chemical engineering and interdisciplinary courses and conducted research in education methods for over fifteen years.  He has received three university-wide teaching awards and held a Jenni faculty teaching fellowship at CSM.

He has received numerous grant awards for educational research from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.  Dr. Miller is chair of the chemical engineering department assessment committee and acting chair of the CSM assessment committee.

 Dr Barbara M. Olds is Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Liberal Arts and International Studies at the Colorado School of Mines where she has taught for the past seventeen years.  She has participated in a number of curriculum innovation projects and has been active in the engineering education and assessment communities.  Dr. Olds has received the Brown Innovative Teaching Grant and the Amoco Outstanding Teaching Award at CSM and was the CSM Faculty Senate Distinguished Lecturer for 1993-94.  She was a Fulbright lecturer/researcher in Sweden in 1999.

She has received grant awards for educational research from the national Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.  She is former chair of the CSM assessment committee.

Past Participant Comments

  • "Ron and Barbara successfully conveyed both how to do assessment right and how to do it while retaining one's sanity."  After three one-day sessions spread over an academic year, the entire group of faculty participants had the know-how, the motivation, and the internal group resources to continue the outcomes assessment process on their own -- and that is the highest praise that any presenter could receive."
  • The workshops were organized, highly interactive, and informative.  Our engineering faculty gained the knowledge necessary to develop high quality assessment plans and then implement them.  Barbara and Ron were skilled at engaging the participants in important activities such as writing measurable goals and objectives and considering what assessment methods to use.   Their insight into effective program evaluation has provided valuable guidance to our departments as they prepare for ABET review."