Unified Accreditation Update
Two teams that have spent the past several months collecting and organizing data for the Fall 2022 University of Maine System (UMS) New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) Self Study will complete the first– and, by far, the biggest– stage of that work this month. Their data will be shared with provosts, registrars, financial aid leaders, and faculty for review and feedback, and the revised data will be included in the third and final public self study draft being shared with the UMS community in mid-May. The data teams, which comprise UMS and university institutional research (IR) and assessment staff, UMS Human Resources (HR) staff, and UMS Finance staff, have done a terrific job with this critical piece of the overall self study.
Relatedly, the campus accreditation officers and a number of UMS and university staff have collected links to UMS and university reports and web resources of all kinds and have begun organizing them in what NECHE calls a “digital workroom.” The workroom will serve as a one-stop resource for the evaluation team visiting our universities this fall, and is meant to supplement information provided in the self study narrative and data. As you might suspect, organizing the workroom takes considerable time and careful attention to detail. We applaud the work that the accreditation officers and their colleagues have done in this important arena.
Finally, several UMS and university IR leaders are creating a small but pivotal set of charts, graphs, and tables for inclusion in the self study narrative. These visual representations of key data points and trends will help us “tell our story”– as NECHE encourages us to do– in the most effective way possible, and we’re grateful to the talented professionals who are developing them.