ADULT DEGREE PROGRAM
Our group partnered with the Adult Degree Program at James Madison University. We communicated mostly with Carol Fleming, Interim Assistant Vice Provost, and Sarah MacDonald, Interim Senior Director, in order to assist with the evaluation.
THE PARTNERSHIP
The initial goal for the Adult Degree Program was to receive fifteen responses from ADP students regarding their experiences. Carol Fleming figured the responses previously gathered combined with the newer results would provide enough data to evaluate the program.
THE INITIAL GOAL
THE CHALLENGE
The Adult Degree Program offers non-traditional students the opportunity to return to school to obtain a college degree. These students are offered courses in online and on-campus settings. The ADP was being evaluated by consultants at the end of October, so they asked us to help them gather data from the students. The Adult Degree Program experienced a lack of participation in their first initiative, which encouraged students to fill out a survey via email. Carol and Sarah challenged us to collect fifteen survey responses to add to their initial six responses that they got by email.
Our team had more individual goals and objectives we drafted in order to achieve our overall goal. Our initial meeting was utilized to create smaller goals for each week. Using resources such as Trello and Google Docs, we were able to track our goals and efforts to ensure we were meeting deadlines and completing objectives. We allotted our group one week to complete certain tasks. We met on Fridays to discuss objectives that were not met or what we needed to focus on for the following week. In the early stages, we planned to meet with the ADP staff, draft a survey and receive student contacts. Once these tasks were completed and we gathered information, we were able to set goals of how many responses to get each week. We had about three weeks to finish the project, so we aimed for each of us to get five responses a week.