Watermark

Faculty Senate and Academic Affairs is happy to announce a multi-year project to digitalize and integrate faculty evaluation documents and electronic course evaluations for faculty use, annual reviews and tenure/rank promotions. Implementation of these platforms will occur in parallel with the faculty senate’s review of the Faculty Annual Review (FAR) and tenure/promotion processes, ensuring proper alignment between policy and technology. Full implementation of this platform is targeted to begin in the 2024 Academic year.

WSU has purchased three platforms from the Watermark system:

  1. The course evaluation platform is Watermark’s Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES), and is designed to give faculty more control and involvement in their course evaluations. Likewise, CES is connected directly to the student’s Blackboard dashboard where they will be able to manage all their course evaluations.
  2. The Faculty Success (FS) (formerly Digital Measures) is currently being used at other Kansas Regents Institutions including (list them?) to provide centralized electronic storage for faculty activity (teaching, research/performances, service) and is designed to be fully integrated into our Student Information System (Banner), Blackboard and auxiliary enterprise data systems.
  3. WSU has also purchased the Planning & Self-Study software to facilitate program review and accreditation processes, but this component will take longer to install and integrate.

CES is fully integrated into the Faculty Success platform as well as into our Student Information System (Banner) and Blackboard learning management system as well as meets KBOR’s requirement for a normed instrument.  Thus, utilization of this platform will aid in specialty accreditation data collection and reporting, program review, and HLC reporting. 

While CES has the ability to provide several survey question types such as a common core set for all courses (defined by delivery time), college division and department centric, and instructor defined questions, we will focus in FY 2023 on the development and use of the common core questions provided by the faculty senate.  SPTE course evaluations will continue for fiscal year 2023 and be replaced by CES in academic year 2024.

CES will only be deployed for course related surveys; faculty pursuing general surveys and research will continue to use Qualtrics, the recognized institutional platform for conducting surveys. 

Contacts:

For more information or to ask questions, please contact David Wright: Project Director

Sandy Ranney: Watermark CES Administrator

Susan Castro: Faculty Senate President

Carolyn Speer: Academic Affairs, OIR