Like many, I work as a teacher, and while my role is not designated as a project manager, the various hats I wear require me to apply project management principles on a regular basis. For example, one project I worked on involved getting faculty on board with using eLumen. to document student learning outcome (SLO) data. This was part of an effort from the Student Learning Outcome committee in which I participate. The purpose of using eLumen technology is to formalize the process of documenting SLO data within the college. Basically, we are tasked with working on a recommendation from the ACCJC, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, to make progress on integrating an institutional process to collect and analyze student learning outcome data. In this particular project, I was not involved in the decision to purchase eLumen to facilitate SLO work, just the task of getting faculty to use it. Our goals were to get faculty to (1) update their SLOs so that they accurately represent the goals of their courses and that the SLOs listed on their syllabi are the same as those entered into eLumen; (2) to assess their SLOs in eLumen; (3) to analyze their assessment data in a manner that drives program changes to increase student success.

I can’t say we had a very clear picture of what we were doing the whole time, but we had to layer our approach given that different departments were at different stages with their work; some needed to focus on revising their SLOs while others needed to learn how to use eLumen to assess SLOs, and all needed to organize an assessment and analysis cycle and get enough faculty to input SLO data so that it can be sufficient enough to inform their discussions on student success. Initially, we offered several workshops and dedicated a “SLO Liasson” to each division for one-on-one assistance with eLumen (which is not an intuitive program to use). We then transitioned to training coordinators for each department to organize SLO assessment; to assist them we had to create assessment and reflection templates for them to use, basically because eLumen can be very confusing to use and, as I said, is not intuitive, so we had to design a more intuitive and user-friendly experience for faculty. Finally, departments were tasked with creating a 3-year SLO assessment plan for programs and then report out their progress with SLO assessment and analysis on their annual program review report. The scope of this project is ongoing, and it took about three years to get departments in a good place with being organized with their SLO assessment and understanding how to use eLumen. It took this long in part because the SLO committee did not fully understand all the quirks of eLumen. When we came up with a system to design the user experience in eLumen in a more simplistic manner, departments were then able to make a lot more progress. Working with the program review committee to include an SLO section on the program review report was also very helpful. Overall, it was a very messy process that could have taken less time to figure out if we had more training on how to use the various functions in eLumen in the first place.