Who should be reading this

If you are a representative of a college, department, or program interested in using the Electronic Assessment System (EAS) for your assessment purposes, read on. If you are a student, faculty, or adviser user of EAS, please visit the linked help pages. If you are a college-level administrator of EAS, please visit the administrators' help page.

About EAS

EAS is a web-based system for the submission, evaluation, and review of student documents for program-, college-, or University-wide assessment purposes. Students submit documents to the system for evaluation; faculty evaluate the documents; and reviewers assess the performance of students and programs over time. EAS is not a course management system or an electronic portfolio system, though it shares features of both. Instead, EAS stores only those documents pertaining to assessment. Students complete their assessment assignments as if they were homework assignments, and their instructors (or optionally others) evaluate the assignments according to the metrics set up for that requirement in EAS. Documents stay in the system for an indefinite period of time, and reports generated within EAS can remove any student identifying information if required.

First steps

Terminology

First, here is a glossary of assessment-related terms as used within EAS. Using the common terminology will help you communicate your intentions with the EAS administrators who will be configuring your assessment requirements.

Requirement

One or more assignments addressing a common standard for assessment. An example requirement might be "Writing Assessment."

Assignment

An instance of a requirement hosted in one or more sections of a course, the completion of which fulfills a requirement. For example, the Writing Assessment requirement might be hosted in ten different sections of ENGL-1110; each of those constitutes an assignment. A student, registered in just one of those sections, completes the assignment in that section to fulfill the Writing Assessment requirement.

Artifact

A document submitted by a student to complete an assignment. For example, a student might submit an essay to complete the Writing Assessment requirement.

Context attributes

Questions to be answered in relation to the assignment being completed. An example of these might be questions relating to the environment (urban/suburban/rural or lower elementary/upper elementary/junior high) in which a student teacher completed his or her field teaching experience.

Assessment dimension

The ways by which the artifact is to be evaluated. For example, a writing assignment might be evaluated on the dimensions of purpose, organization, development, and language/style.

Assessment metrics

The different "grades" assigned to an artifact when it is evaluated. For example, Exemplary, Satisfactory, and Unsatisfactory.

Business processes

We've developed a process for helping programs get their assessment requirements into EAS. The process is geared towards efficiency (approval from your college dean is the only approval you need), customer service "best practices" towards our students, and adequate notification to the staff who will need to configure your requirement in EAS.

The timeline associated with the EAS business process is as follows:

• One year prior to the start of the term: Programs and colleges decide what they intend to assess, what possible metrics will be used for assessment, and what possible courses will be associated with the assessment requirements.
• Nine months prior to the start of the term: Department chairs start the EAS requirement creation process in conjunction with their colleges' EAS administrators. The process will be completed before the following milestone.
• Six months prior to the start of the term (beginning of early registration): Courses associated with the new requirement are flagged as assessment-related. Changes are due to the college EAS administrator two weeks prior to the start of early registration. The details of the assessment requirements do not need to be finalized, but the courses to which the requirements are associated must be final by this date to allow system administrators adequate time to update the systems.
• One month prior to the start of the term: Finalized assessment requirements are entered into EAS.

Decide what you want to assess

You will probably find for your particular program's assessment requirements that there are certain standards your students must achieve in order to show that your program is effective. Those standards may be specific to your program, and detailed enough that you can identify specific courses in your program that teach concepts associated with the desired standards. The standards can easily be adapted into requirements and assessment dimensions. The courses that teach the concepts then become naturals for hosting your assessment requirements.

Getting your assessment requirements into EAS

First, download and complete the EAS requirement update form (Word format, 576 kB) in conjunction with your college's EAS administrator (contact info is at the end of this page). As the timeline above suggests you should have in mind by this point what you want to assess and in which courses your requirements will be hosted.

Work with your EAS administrator to complete the form. Not all aspects of the form may apply to you. You will probably use a single requirement and evaluate artifacts on different dimensions rather than create several requirements, each of which has a single dimension. The form itself does not have much room to enter requirements descriptions, so plan on attaching documentation describing your requirement, the ways in which assignments are to be evaluated, and the like. In addition to the instructions on the form, read on for more information about the different aspects of the assessment requirement form.

Context attributes

As described above, these are questions to be asked of students relating to the assignment being completed. Your EAS requirement may consist of an artifact to upload, questions to be answered, or both. The context attributes are akin to a small survey. The questions asked in this part of the requirement should help you, upon analysis, answer the questions you are asking as part of the assessment process. For example, if one of your context attributes asked as part of the Writing Assessment requirement is "Did you write your essay in a public computing lab, at home, or in your residence hall?" you could see if the variable "writing location" had an effect on the overall performance of students completing the assignment.

Your context attribute questions can be open-ended (text entry), checkboxes (select one or more), or radio buttons (choose one option). Answers to the questions can be customized or selected from common answer options (for example, yes/no/maybe or poor/fair/average/good/excellent). If you want to ask context attributes as part of the students' completion of an assignment, attach a copy of your desired questions to the requirements update form.

Student artifacts

Generally, the submission of an artifact or document is the key completion of an assessment-related requirement. You can choose to offer students the ability to try multiple times to complete an assignment successfully (e.g., if their performance is unsatisfactory do they get another chance), not including artifacts submitted in error (these can always be backed out by the EAS administrator).

One important point to remember is that only one artifact can be submitted in fulfillment of a requirement. If your requirement is the submission of a portfolio of works, for example, your students must collect the portfolio into a single file (a zip archive, for example) before submission to EAS. There is no file format limitation in EAS, although of course if instructors cannot open documents submitted to EAS they will be unable to evaluate those documents. There is also no file size limitation, at the present time. A 170 GB file system is allocated to EAS and can be expanded as necessary.

Assessment Dimensions and Metrics

Your assessment dimensions should be a few independent "axes" by which you will assess the student's artifact and/or context attributes. For simplicity's sake, the metric groups you use should be one of a few standardized criteria: the standard A-F, satisfactory/unsatisfactory, or exemplary/satisfactory/unsatisfactory, for example. Additional metric groups can be added to EAS if desired. Certain of the metrics in each group are designated as failing grades: e.g., F and unsatisfactory. If you have configured your requirement to allow for multiple submissions, evaluation of a student's completed assignment with a failing grade will allow that student to upload another artifact to complete the assignment.

It will generally be the case that your students and instructors or other evaluators will need to know what a particular metric means for a particular assessment dimension. For example, a satisfactory grade in the dimension of language/style (for the Writing Assessment requirement) may mean that the student used correct grammar, and the style of his or her writing is appropriate for the audience. These criteria are different than the criteria for assigning a satisfactory grade in the dimension of purpose (e.g., the writer developed a thesis and provided evidence in support of the thesis).

After the requirements are set up

Once your requirement is configured in EAS, it's ready to be used.

For students and instructors

After EAS is properly configured (your college EAS administrator will inform you when everything is set), students and instructors can access their "to do" lists (what assignments students need to complete or what assignments instructors need to evaluate) by logging into EAS. If students or instructors are associated with assessment-related sections, a small reminder will appear when they are logged into the self-service applications, Web for Students and Web for Faculty and Advisers. The student reminder is located on the Student Services page, the main menu that appears as soon as a student is logged in. For faculty, the reminder is on the Faculty Services page (accessible as a link from the General Services menu after they log in). Or, students, faculty, advisers, and others can access EAS directly via the link https://my0.utoledo.edu/eas/.

In both cases access to EAS is via UTAD user ID and password. A UTAD account is required in order to set the PIN for Web for Faculty and Advisers, or to reset the PIN in either system, or to access public labs on campus. UTAD account maintenance (including activation) is available at http://myutaccount.utoledo.edu/.

For external users

EAS has the capability of allowing specific people outside of the University to access the system and evaluate specific documents from students. For example, education students performing field experience at a local school would have the principal or someone else at that school evaluate their performance (if field experience were coded in EAS as an assessment requirement).

External users should enter the user ID provided to them via email (of the form EASnnnnnn) and password, and select the "I do not have a UTAD account" radio button. These external users have limited access to EAS and can only perform assessments of artifacts submitted by specific students. The EAS administrator creates external users and assigns them to students. At the present time the password for external EAS users cannot be changed; this may be a future enhancement to EAS.

For advisers

The advisers role in EAS allows these users to view students' test score information (culled from the SIS data warehouse) as well as assessment-related information in EAS. Access is by request only; contact your college's EAS administrator for more information.

Reports

Eventually EAS reports will be migrated to the Crystal Enterprise Framework. This is a web-based reporting environment and will let reviewers of reports use Crystal reports from within a web browser. Crystal is the reporting tool for EAS. It is ideally suited for multidimensional analysis, such as is common for assessment. The initial EAS deployment consists of Crystal reports accessed via the native Crystal tool (client/server framework). If you need to access EAS reports in this method you will need the Crystal client, and a client access license. Contact EIT's Enterprise Applications Group for assistance.

As the Crystal framework is developed and completed this area will be updated with more information about writing Crystal reports and viewing them from within EAS.

Changing a requirement

The time may come when you decide your requirement is not addressing all of your assessment needs and you want to change it. For consistency in your reports your EAS administrator should deactivate your current requirement and create a new one, with your new definitions, in its place. The same methodology is to be used for changing assessment dimensions, context attributes, or other key components of your requirement.

Contacts

Here are the EAS administrators for each college. If you want to implement electronic assessment in your college or program, contact the listed person for further assistance in the EAS requirement process. Or, contact the Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Robert Sheehan at 419.530.2214, or the interim Senior Director of Enterprise Applications (EIT), Robert Spiker at 419.530.3678. For the colleges without an administrator, you may contact Dana Xiao at 419.530.3695.