As CIO, I have always been involved in SUNY Cortland’s NCATE accreditation process. We are currently laying the groundwork for our reaccreditation, scheduled for April 2011 when the BOE (Board of Examiners) will be on campus. It seems like a long way off, but preparations have begun in earnest. One year prior to the campus visit, each program is required to submit a SPA (Specialized Program Association) report that details how each curriculum meets specified standards. The SPA report must include evidence that programs are of high quality and produce successful graduates.

As a member of Cortland’s NCATE Steering Committee, I have been trying to establish some consistent means of assessment that can be used by various programs, each with its own standards. Today several of us had a conference call with TaskStream, the company that has developed the e-portfolio system used in several academic departments. We learned about TaskStream’s Accountability Management System (AMS), which together with the Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) can be customized to create the data we need to support the SPA documents.  Sounds like a foreign language? Well, maybe. But we all seem to understand each other and are feeling confident that we’ve got the tools we need.

Library bibliographers, in concert with our technology trainer, will work with academic departments to deploy the Task Stream e-portfolio system to collect data that maps to the accreditation standards on which we are evaluated.  It’s all about knowing which technologies to use for which processes, and we seem to have a plan. Lots to do in the next two years!