Rock Valley College Selects TracDat for Continuous Improvement and Assessment Management
Highly Configurable Solution Adapts Easily to Support Existing Assessment Initiatives

PITTSBURGH, PA, October 23, 2006 – Nuventive, a leading provider of individual and institutional assessment solutions, today announced that Rock Valley College, a two-year community college located in Rockford, Illinois, will implement Nuventive TracDat, an enterprise assessment management solution to manage the process of institutional assessment and continuous improvement, throughout the institution.

Rock Valley College serves over 300,000 people in the greater Rockford metropolitan area. Students enrolled at the college can earn associate degrees in 60 disciplines for transfer to four-year colleges; career-oriented associate degrees in 23 areas, and 72 short-term certificates. The college is recognized as a leader in providing quality, accessible, lifelong learning opportunities, cultural enrichment and support for economic and technical development.

As a key component of the college’s mission to reinforce a culture of continuous improvement, Rock Valley College conducts an ongoing and thorough self-examination. This process strives to improve programs and services and ensure that the needs of both the students and the community are met. Understanding that integral to this effort is a viable assessment process that includes the entire college community, Rock Valley will use TracDat to manage program improvement across the extended enterprise of students, faculty, and administration, including goal and objective setting and tracking, planning and sharing best practices.

This initiative was launched as the college sought to identify a solution that would not only streamline the cumbersome manual process and establish consistency in planning and assessment methodology, but also establish an effective repository to facilitate the collection, interpretation and correlation of all of the assessment data across the institution. A critical component of the college’s evaluation criteria was that the solution needed to support existing content. The assessment committees at Rock Valley had developed a considerable quantity of assessment related materials and the evaluation team did not want to repeat the significant effort already made by the faculty chairs.

Rock Valley College selected TracDat after a comprehensive competitive evaluation. The evaluation team met with peers and colleagues at McHenry County College, which uses TracDat as a key component of an extremely successful assessment process. TracDat will enable Rock Valley College to document, evaluate progress and measure success in the critical general education area.

TracDat will also assist Rock Valley in preparation for its 2007 assessment-focused evaluation visit from the Higher Learning Commission. By improving organizational alignment and linking course and program objectives that support the institution’s strategic plan and mission, the accreditation team will be able to get a comprehensive view of progress at Rock Valley College. TracDat will also be able to provide documentation of how institutional outcomes assessment results are being used to improve programs and learning.

The initial rollout of TracDat at Rock Valley College is in the program assessment area.
Existing assessment information is entered into TracDat by the academic chairs. Rock Valley found TracDat to be an excellent fit with the assessment materials already developed, which meant that there would be no major changes for the faculty chairs. “I've started entering learning outcomes, their methods of assessment, results and recommendations from program assessment done in the math department. TracDat was user-friendly and because the template we developed used the same categories as TracDat it was fairly simple to put in the information,” said Carol Anderson, Chair, Mathematics.

“TracDat has played a significant role in our transition from a cumbersome paper–based system to a fully-electronic system for storing and organizing data. Now that the system is up and running, the number of individuals and departments that are able to access and utilize the system has grown significantly. The information doesn't just sit on a shelf and gather dust. It is now available in a format where all will be able to read and make better informed decisions associated with curriculum. And with the reporting capabilities of TracDat, we now have the tools we need to clearly communicate our findings to our stakeholders and accrediting bodies,” stated Dr. Evan McHugh, Director of Sciences.

“Rock Valley College provides an important educational and economic role in a vital metropolitan area,” said Dr. David Raney, Nuventive CEO. ”We are delighted that they have selected TracDat to assist the college in its pursuit of continuous organizational and individual improvement.”

About Rock Valley College
Rock Valley College is located in Rockford, Illinois. The 217 acre main campus, along with four satellite locations offers degrees of Associate in Arts; Associate in Science; Associate in General Studies, and Associate in Applied Science. RVC is a leader in providing quality, accessible, lifelong learning opportunities, cultural enrichment, and support for economic and technological development. Rock Valley College’s service area encompasses Rockford Illinois, an urban city of 150,000, and the surrounding areas of Winnebago and Boone counties, and portions of Ogle, Stephenson, McHenry, and DeKalb counties. Total population in this area is over 344,000 residents. www.rockvalleycollege.edu/

About Nuventive
Nuventive is a leading provider of comprehensive, integrated real-time solutions that enable its customers to support the continuous process of assessing, managing and improving learning. Nuventive customers are institutions, faculty, administrators, students and private sector users in over 20 countries. Institutional customers include Western Michigan University, the 14 campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, Delgado Community College and Providence College. Nuventive maintains strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as the European Institute for E-Learning (EIfEL).Thousands of users around the world have licensed Nuventive products and the Company has received industry as well as customer recognition for its innovative solutions.

Nuventive is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with distribution in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. For more information, please visit www.nuventive.com or call +1.412.847.0280 or 1.877.366.8700.

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