An Assessment System to Support Multi-Level Program Outcomes Evaluation Using Blackboard

This is an Innovative Practice Full Paper. Our department has three computing programs seeking accreditations from ABET CAC and EAC. With new ABET criteria, we adopted performance indicators (PIs) for our two levels of outcomes, devised to map to the general and program specific criteria of the two commissions. The Blackboard is our university's mandated learning management system (LMS). In order to automatically create outcomes achievement reports for students in each major, we developed a new process and an ABET tool to integrate with Blackboard. The new process utilizes Blackboard to create PI rubrics and directly assess student work with rubrics. However, direct download of assessed rubrics data is not available in Blackboard, so that a third-party tool is used to export rubrics data. Achievement reports for students in a single major are desired for ABET outcomes and our two-level outcomes. Since student major information is not available in Blackboard, the ABET tool integrates data from Blackboard and another university proprietary system to distinguish students in the same major and creates a variety of short-term and long-term reports for our ABET continuous quality improvements. The introduced process and ABET tool is applicable to other departments using the Blackboard LMS.