Company History
LiveText evolved during the mid 1990s out of its development of a course management system (CMS)for the K-12 sector. By the late 90s, Co-founder Robert Budnik, along with three other co-founders at that time, decided to reengineer their CMS to be an accreditation management system for schools and colleges of education, based primarily on National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards.

"We decided to help higher education automate this accreditation process," Budnik explains. "So, we went to every NCATE accreditation workshop. We sent our programmers. We sent everybody that we could within the company to better understand the accreditation process. [In addition], we visited with institutions to learn more, to see their documentation and to understand their processes."

By January 2000, LiveText sponsored the general session at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) conference. Budnik gave a presentation. "I got up in front of 1,500 people at the general session, introduced LivText and asked them to please stop by our booth if they were interested in learning more. Over the next two days I never sat down. We had hundreds of deans coming up to us saying ‘this is exactly what we need.’"

What All Accrediting Agencies Have in Common
According to Budnik, LiveText today has 450 institutional clients. In 2004, the company started to branch out into other disciplines. "We started looking at the institution as a whole and at other colleges, such as colleges of business, nursing, health sciences, pharmacy and engineering - all these other programs," Budnik says. This became the impetus of a research project to discover what all accrediting agencies had in common. The end result was a grid with six common components that every accrediting agency is looking for - "what we call six guiding principles," he explains.

They are:

1. Accrediting agencies want to see that institutions have missions and goals that are being accomplished.
    
2. Accrediting agencies want to see that institutions have academically and/or professionally qualified faculty.
    
3. Accrediting agencies want to be assured that students are learning and getting more than just a grade.
    
4. Accrediting agencies want to see that curriculum instruction is aligned to the institution’s missions, goals and learning objectives.
    
5. Accrediting agencies want to see that there is an effective assessment planning process in place internally.
    
6. Accrediting agencies want to see that the institution is effectively utilizing its finances/resources.

"We have a suite of tools that address the six guiding principles for accreditation," Budnik says.

Meeting Missions and Goals
Revealing how an institution meets its missions and goals can be accomplished with the LiveText Forms tool that allows users to create survey, evaluation and data collection forms for a variety of purposes. Surveys of alumni and their employers, current students, and the local community, for example, can be created in order to seek out information related to whether or not institutional and/or program missions and goals are being met.

In addition, a number of LiveText Review and Assessment tools, including eportfolio-production tools, can be utilized to assess student learning and create reports directly related to institutional missions and goals.

Qualified Faculty
The LiveText Forms tool can also be utilized to inform accrediting agencies about an institution’s academically and/or professionally qualified faculty. Qualification forms and annual surveys can be completed by faculty, and housed in the LiveText system, as a means to keep faculty credentials and accomplishments updated on a regular basis.

Additionally, faculty eportfolios can be developed and consistently maintained with the LiveText eportfolio tools.

Assurance
The third, fourth and fifth aforementioned guiding principles are closely related to each other and represent great and numerous challenges institutions typically face during accreditation processes. Assurance of student learning (#3) emphasizes both direct and indirect measures.

Direct measures, such as results from Educational Testing Service (ETS) exams, can be imported into the LiveText system from a campus student information system (SIS) and correlated to learning outcomes and then benchmarked to other factors, both demographic and test-related (see "Reporting" below). Authentic assessments, such as those that have rubrics based on learning outcomes, are another important facet for providing direct measurements to accrediting agencies.

Indirect measures, says Budnik, are typically based on surveys and are often self-evaluation or peer-review oriented measurements.

Evidence
Overall, most institutions struggle with how to provide the appropriate evidence of student learning for their accreditation visits. Budnik says that when an institution approaches his company, or vice versa, the early discussions typically focus on discovering what learning objectives and outcomes need to be measured and at what levels. He explains that there are basically three overarching options to take under consideration when building the structure for providing evidence of student learning:

How It Works
Budnik further explains how many of the assessment-oriented features and functions work inside LiveText. First, educators define and align learning objectives to rubrics. "We teach them how to build rubrics and make those alignments in our system. Most likely they have identified specific courses in which a portfolio is going to be used, or where a course-embedded assessment is going to occur. LiveText has the ability to import those courses in from the campus-wide student information system."

The imported course listings can be displayed inside both faculty and administrative views within the LiveText interface. Here faculty and administrators can see the entire class roster, along with views of each student’s extensive eportfolio submissions and the results of course-embedded assessments and assignments that he/she has built up inside their personal LiveText student view/interface. Plus, data resides in the background - or what’s referred to as query points by LiveText - that have been imported from the SIS when the course was added.

Faculty login to LiveText and see these imported courses with rosters aligned to student portfolios, assessments, assignments and more. From this point they are able to take advantage of a robust system with numerous functions and features, including the ability to conduct and record formative and summative evaluations, with or without rubrics, of each student’s work.

Reporting
In relation to the reporting features available in LiveText, administrative-enabled users can login to extrapolate and analyze data at the individual [student or faculty], program, unit and institutional levels within the LiveText system. The reporting features and functions allow users to retrieve data based on standards, outcomes or competencies. "You can extrapolate a lot," Budnik says. "From the reporting point of view not only did we import course rosters and the faculty associated with the courses, we have also imported student demographic data. We basically have three different imports inside LiveText: catalog import, course roster import and student profile import. In the student profile import we have brought in test data, gender, age, etc. The user has a bunch of query tables where he or she can see, for example, all students who were assessed against a communication learning outcome that have a 3.5 or greater GPA. I can export the data or it will give me a simple table inside LiveText that will reveal if there is a correlation between GPA, race and gender [for that particular communication learning outcome]."

Additionally, users can generate inter-rater summary reports where they can view results and patterns related to how multiple faculty members have used the same rubric. So, for example, if a certain number of students with high GPAs suddenly scored low in critical thinking, Budnik explains, "what does that tell you? It could mean that the professor(s) assessing those students did not use the rubric. Or maybe the rubric or the learning object that was developed is not right."

Users can further customize reports using a variety of LiveText filters, as well as export data out to a third-party program. "When you start going toward institutional effectiveness, they are typically using SPSS or SAS [statistical software packages], and they have other data they are tracking somewhere else," Budnik explains. "They export out the raw data from LiveText and put it inside their SPSS or SAS model and then marry the two together for further detailed reporting."

Finances and Resources
Finally, the sixth guiding principle - about the utilization of finances and resources - "is the most challenging one for us to accommodate," Budnik says. Institutional resources are based on large files of information related to whether or not an institutional is financially viable and what they may need to accomplish in order to become more financially viable. "Typically what people do in our system is upload EXCEL spreadsheets and balance statements. So you can think of us as more of a container for that kind of information."

The Big Picture
Actually, the big container in LiveText where the reports, self-study documents and more are ultimately housed is called the Exhibit Center. Here administrators can create a share list for internal reviewers and editors as well as provide visitor passes to accreditation examiners. There is also an audit trail function that records the examiners’ click through history.