The purpose of Academic Program Review is to enhance the educational mission of the college by providing opportunities (i.e. organizational space) for programs and departments, and the college as a whole, to assess and improve its teaching, scholarship and service to the community.
Each review offers an extraordinary opportunity for the unit and the campus to make a comprehensive examination of the unit, to evaluate its opportunities and challenges, to assess its future and connections to the rest of the college, and take action.
The aim is to create and support a review process that allows the campus to pursue exciting new paths of teaching and scholarship while also sustaining excellence in each current disciplinary area.
A central issue of all reviews should be the curriculum and support for students' learning to meet their academic goals.
The potential of the program review process should be developed to promote key campus objectives within a decentralized organizational culture, and to provide critical grounded feedback on the college's current planning and strategic formulations, directions and objectives.
Self-Study Phase
The centerpiece of the unit's review process is the unit's self-study.
Each self-study should express the unit's unique culture, address student-learning outcomes in discipline-specific ways, and provide an opportunity for reflection on and critical assessment of the unit's scholarly directions and academic programs.
A self-study should involve an assessment of strengths and deficiencies and a strategy and recommendations to meet the opportunities and challenges that the unit anticipates over the next significant period (up to eight years).
An external review should be a component in each program review as is feasible and fits with the issues for in-depth examination in the self-study.
Support for program review will include support for appropriate integration between external and internal reviews.
Recommendations and implementation phase
Program reviews should emphasize forward planning informed by analysis of recent data trends with units identifying, through the self-study and the review process, the necessary steps in the form of recommendations to maintain excellence and to correct deficiencies.
Program review should develop plans and recommendations in the self-study to address issues in a timely fashion following the review, rather than addressing issues in the course of the self-study phase.
An implementation phase, connected to the self-study phase, will ensure optimal, timely implementation of recommendations and an appropriate return on the considerable investment of staff time and other resources in collaboration, research, and analysis.
When implementation of specific recommendations is not possible, strategies and priorities will be formulated at the appropriate level of the college to deal with the issues raised by the lack of implementation.
Structure
There should be centralized support for and oversight of program reviews.
The college will maintain a program review process that is distinct from professional or specialized accreditation.
Support for departmental/discipline self-study should be flexible and responsive to the individual needs of the department/discipline.
The importance of statistical data in developing unit self-studies is assumed, and centralized support to departments/disciplines in preparation and interpretation of such data will be provided.
Process
The program review process should take place efficiently and effectively with minimal interruption of the teaching mission of the program.
Program reviews should be made in a timely manner on a well-defined cycle.
Robust means to capture stakeholder feedback will be implemented to inform the self-study.
If elements of the program review process break down, mechanisms are in place to get the process functioning again in a timely manner.
Responsibilities
The program review process during the self-study phase will be faculty-led; both led by program faculty at the program level, and led collectively by faculty at the institution level, and co-led by faculty and administration during the implementation phase.
The program review process will provide well-defined roles for the relevant deans, executive deans, and vice-presidents in raising issues for examination, promoting follow-up on recommendations, and engaging in supervisory and supportive action if the program review process, including implementation phase, breaks down.
