Check out LOAC’s latest resource for faculty: a Canvas “How To” course to help make outcomes assessment simple, Outcomes Assessment Support.
CAI added the course to faculty dashboards just this week. Features include:
Instructions for linking Canvas outcomes to courses/assignments/new quizzes
What you can learn from outcomes assessment data and ways to respond to it
Ideas for how our new General Education Outcomes can be helpful in any course
The course is the brainchild of LOAC Communications subcommittee member Math faculty Odilon Ramirez Javier. His fellow subcommittee member CAI faculty Lauren Funderburg designed the course in consultation with the rest of the group and Assessment Liaison Kim Colantino.
Funderburg also created this printable version of steps to take to add/use outcomes for a Canvas course. This document is also now available on the LOAC site’s Resources page.
Let us know what you think of this new Canvas course! Take a look around, and submit your feedback here so we can make it better.
Our annual Spring LOAC Survey/Raffle is here! Respond to our Spring LOAC survey by May 31 for a chance to win a gift card from Starbucks or Dutch Bros.
Tell us about your experience with outcomes assessment as a faculty member at Chemeketa.
All Chemeketa faculty are charged with teaching to and assessing how students are doing with our faculty-developed, catalog-published course and program outcomes. The work helps us continuously review how well we’re helping students learn what we say we’re teaching, and it helps us align with accreditation standards. LOAC sets direction and designs support for this work. We use your feedback from this annual survey to help us.
Your feedback will help us with 2025-26 projects such as:
Reviewing/updating our website
Updating assessment guidelines and Assessment Plan templates for Spring 2026
Responding to accreditation peer evaluators’ comments about assessment
Reviewing/responding to student feedback about our general education outcomes
We’ll use the survey’s results to help with these projects. And you have a chance to win a gift card just for participating!
Do you have an idea for an outcomes assessment project that would require time beyond normal faculty duties, perhaps doing research over the summer or paying adjunct faculty beyond the means of your department?
You are in luck! The Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs is again offering a total of 270 hours ($20,000) for the 2025-26 academic year for learning outcomes assessment projects. Preference will be given to innovative, practical projects that impact a large number of courses/students and include a plan for using the project’s results to benefit teaching/learning. Read the details here.
By May 31, send your less-than-350-word proposal to academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu, subject line: Assessment Project Proposal. Questions? Contact LOAC chair Nolan Mitchell, Assessment Liaison Kim Colantino, or AOE dean Colton Christian.
Now is a great time to get everything ready to conduct any Spring term outcomes assessments you have planned: Reach out to other faculty teaching the course(s) where the assessment will occur, set up the assessment itself, or connect with AOE or CAI for help getting the assessment ready or connected with Canvas.
Spring is when academic units with three-course sequences often assess how well their students have mastered the outcomes they’ve been building throughout the year. Spring term is also a popular time to pilot a new approach to outcomes assessments with a section or two. You can review the results, make adjustments in response to what you see, and then arrange to administer the assessment in more sections in the fall.
Whatever your situation, many units find it helpful to have some recent outcomes assessment data to review and consider together during inservice in the fall. The data is a good base for conversations about curriculum design for the year ahead.
If you’d like some help getting assessment results into Canvas and Tableau for easy review later, write academicinnovation@chemeketa.edu to reach CAI faculty who know all the tricks for setting that up.
In AOE, we need evidence that faculty use assessments to help students master the learning outcomes that we list in our college catalog. We use that evidence to show our accrediting agency NWCCU that we align with its standards of quality so we maintain our status as an accredited institution.
That’s why we ask all our academic units to document their outcomes assessment activities. We collect evidence that the assessments are happening (in Canvas or another method), and we ask all units to outline and then annually, briefly describe activities in Assessment Plans: What are you planning to do, what did you do, what did you learn, and what are you planning next?
This year by June 30, document your assessment work in the blue cells of your Assessment Plan:
We’ll be reaching out for documentation of outcomes assessment early in the fall if we don’t already have it from you.
And how are faculty doing, providing the documentation we need? As your team that loves to highlight for accreditors the quality work our faculty do for students, we’re delighted to report that we have evidence of outcomes assessment for every academic unit in the college. Thank you all for your help, and keep up the great work!
From time to time while working on outcomes assessment, faculty working on assessments for their academic unit will want to update or change their course or program outcome(s). In the past, catalog deadlines have led to delays in being able to make these changes and begin assessing them right away.
AOE and CAI are exploring a simplified process for changing outcomes that would make piloting new outcomes and assessments easier to do. We should have more information in the Fall, but if you are interested in modifying course or program outcomes this spring or summer, write to us at academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu and we’ll point you in the right direction.
Interested in figuring out ways to deal with assessment in our AI-infused world? Now through the end of Spring term (6/14), you can register here for “AI-Resilient Assessments.”
This self-paced Canvas course is designed to help you navigate assessing student learning in our changing education landscape with widespread access to—and use of—artificial intelligence. What assessment strategies are AI-resilient? In what ways can you use AI to benefit student learning? What is your perspective on “acceptable use” of AI, and how can you communicate that with students? These are questions the course will help you answer.
Keep track of current and upcoming opportunities like this by bookmarking this document with CAI’s most recent professional development newsletters.
To stay accredited, colleges need a system to show that students are learning the outcomes we promise in our course and program outcomes listed in the college catalog. At most colleges, administrators decide how to do this work. At Chemeketa, faculty make those choices, and they do that through LOAC.
LOAC researches, proposes, and votes on directions, and works with departments and administrators to put those directions into action. LOAC creates guidelines for manageable, meaningful outcomes assessment that inform teaching. They also create communication tools and conduct research to decide on their directions.
Does this work sound interesting to you? Join us! We are in particular need of CTE representatives to ensure that LOAC designs make sense for CTE faculty. LOAC meets six times between September and June, twice a term, for a total of 9 hours. Subcommittees work on special projects, such as research or communications.
If you are interested, contact anyone in AOE, or write academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu.
Ed Lazzara, Languages Faculty
Ed Lazzara has been teaching for Languages at Chemeketa for 29 years. But when it comes to formal outcomes assessment, he admits, “I’ve never been able to get too excited about it.” That’s because assessment, and responding to assessment results, “is just built into who I am and how I teach,” he explains.
For example, he was recently teaching his Spanish 101 students about adjective agreement. Correcting daily homework, he noticed students were making a lot of mistakes with adjectives for plural nouns especially. Throughout the day and until the next class, he was turning the puzzle over in his mind: how could I help them master this skill? So right before the next class, he devised a new activity in which students were asked to list people and groups of people in their own lives, and then describe them orally with adjectives to help them practice reaching the right choices for adjective agreement. Next he would assess: did they get better? The chapter test scheduled for the next week was already in place to give him immediate feedback.
Formal assessment seems to him removed from this dynamic interaction that is central to his work as a teacher. And yet, formal assessment helps him and his colleagues confirm for themselves—and highlight and document for the college—that they are helping students master course outcomes through this kind of careful work.
To plan formal outcomes assessment, Languages starts with the concepts and courses they want to formally assess. They typically like to conduct their assessments in the spring. So at the beginning of each three-year cycle, Ed and his colleague Sylvia Herman choose the courses and the outcomes they want to assess. They align their choices with one or two concepts for each year. For the current three-year cycle, for example, they decided to assess speaking and listening outcomes in second-year Spanish in Year 1, listening outcomes in first-year Spanish in Year 2, and outcomes in a relatively new Linguistics course in Year 3.
Then, they don’t want students to have to do extra work for an assessment, so they conduct their outcomes assessments as part of final exams. They involve part-time faculty in the implementation stage, vetting ideas for which exam questions could best assess the planned outcomes. Then they administer the exams and extrapolate the results of their selected questions across course sections. Faculty review and document results and findings in a document they provide to AOE at the end of each year.
While Ed does not use Canvas to report results, he has found it very useful for gathering video recordings of students so he can assess mastery of speaking outcomes in a manageable way.
Assessment for Languages is probably made easier because the faculty align their courses closely with their course outcomes.
Knowing the outcomes mastery level they want to help their students reach allows these faculty to narrow down which advanced skills outcomes they want to assess at the end of the year. They shoot for a target where 80% of their students reach mastery in 80% of the selected outcomes. Maybe because they’ve been helping students build those skills bit by bit throughout each year, he says, “we almost always hit our targets.”
Faculty-led LOAC works with college departments and committees to design guidelines, processes, and infrastructure that support manageable, meaningful, useful outcomes assessment and results, shaped by faculty to support teaching and learning. Learn more at the LOAC Google Site. Check out our new “Definitions” page to help you get acquainted with outcomes assessment at Chemeketa!
Illustrations by Storyset.com
AOE: Academic and Organizational Effectiveness. This department manages our outcomes assessment plans and evidence. Contact academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu
IRR: Institutional Research and Reporting. This department, part of AOE, processes outcomes assessment data into Tableau reports. Contact colton.christian@chemeketa.edu
CAI: Center for Academic Innovation. This department manages support for faculty professional development and Canvas outcomes assessment. Contact academicinnovation@chemeketa.edu