Facelift your report and articles to increase the access and influence of your assessment work!

I love Chris Lysy and his freshspectrum blogs and cartoons. This is an evaluator who knows how to communicate and catch his audience's attention. In a recent blog: Access is NOT a Vanity Metric. Chris proposed five strategies to increase access to one's work, traditionally presented in the form of a report (as PDF files posted on the website) or as journal articles behind the Login gates. His strategies are:

1. take a PDF and adapt it into an HTML-based report.
2. take a long wordy report and adapt it into a string of infographics.
3. take a report written at a post-graduate reading level and adapt it into a report that doesn’t require more than a lower secondary education level.
4. turn big tables or complicated charts into nice, easy-to-follow charts.
5. turn qualitative interview transcripts into a story collection.

(Blogging is also what Chris proposed to increase access to and influence of one's work, back in 2011 in fact. And I finally started doing it now in 2023, more than a decade later!). Better late than never, I guess. 

His proposed strategies prompted some ideas in me.

1. Transform PDFs into web articles.

To make our office's website compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), our IT specialist recommended that we transform all of our PDF reports into webpages. At the time, I was appalled by the idea, thinking about the numerous reports and workshop PDF handouts that we published on the website. We did not do the conversion. What I did is to create more web pages for my articles and projects. For example, I wrote a Civic Learning Assessment Guide for Course Instructors as a PDF stored in our Assessment and Learning Resource Repository. Then, I had it published as a web article on our office's website. I found the web article to be easier to share and refer to.

In addition to writing a project report, I start to build a project website, like the site for the Institutional Assessment of Oral Communication and Civic Engagement Assessment. I feel a project website is more effective as an internal communication tool among project participants, as a record of what we accomplished. A website makes the project feel like a living and growing thing, rather than a final lifeless product like a report.

2. Change the writing style from reporting to communicating.

One of the missions of the Grand Challenges in Assessment Projects is the dissemination of evidence-informed practical solutions. The members of the project published an impressive number of articles. the question is: How much time do practitioners have to sort through the articles to find practical solutions to their problems. Wouldn't it be nice that, for each topic, we have a webpage that describes: what it is, ways to address it, examples, and sources. For example, on the topic of Co-curricular assessment, we can transfer the journal article into the following sections:

• Common co-curricular learning outcomes
• Common assessment strategies for co-curricular learning
• Assessment strategies for rapid pedagogical improvement
• Selected literature sources on teaching & learning theories
• Selected literature sources on assessment
• Examples and Resources

For each section. we can provide bulleted lists, rather than narratives for easy reading. 

I also started transforming my workshop content into web articles. I recently co-delivered a workshop with Stephanie Foster and Sheri Popp on facilitating assignment charrettes. I feel that I can better organize our ideas when I start to write the how-to article with the following structure.

• Reasons to organize assignment charrettes
• When to organize assignment charrettes
• Preparing for the event
• Assignment strategies to present
• Facilitating the charrette
• Considerations for Different Assignment Focus
• Evaluation of the effectiveness of the charrette
• Templates and Resources

Such a plan excites me. I think it is easier for assessment professionals to get the basic information on running an assignment charrette. It suits different learning styles. They can skim, do a careful reading of a specific section, and/or check out the resources under a particular section to deepen their learning.  

To our team, this is another form of dissemination, another accomplishment, and possibly we can reach more people. Transforming workshops into online how-to articles would be the direction that I want to go in the future.

3. Use charts and infographics

When I read a webpage, my eyes are grabbed by charts, graphics, lists, and bolded texts. Today I happen to see some nice examples:

Agile Wayfinding Planning Process by Christopher Davis (2023)

I also like this image that my student helped me to create that represents common successful professional development elements

The workshop schedule infographic below includes a lot of information in an organized way

University of Hawaii at Manoa Search Advocate Workshop Dates (Accessed on 7/6/2023)

The problem is that images take up space both on the webpage and in terms of storage. Making these images ADA-compliant can also be a challenge. 

4. Turn interviews into showcase or story collections

I love that Chris suggested this strategy because this is the idea that I have also advocated for national assessment projects that I participated in. Whenever we do interview projects, we are learning success stories and gain insights into the conditions for success, as well as the challenges. There is no reason that we don't publish each story or case in its own light. In fact, even before the interview, we could envision what is the structure of the story that we want to publish. This can help us ask better questions. 

In the end, we, assessment professionals, raised as academics, have to function as influencers. Making what we have to say easier to read and digest would be the first step.