Webinars

The Distance Education Accrediting Commission periodically offers educational webinars on topics relevant to DEAC accreditation standards, policies, and procedures; legislative updates; and other topics relevant to the distance education field.

Archived Webinars

Join Dr. Caulyne Barron as she offers insights to define and describe assigning credit to comply with DEAC’s Standard III.F. In this webinar, you’ll review DEAC standards and other critical documents to define academic units of measure. Using real world examples, attendees will be able to distinguish between engagement and preparation and apply best practices for estimating time on task. The session focuses on developing internal processes and emphasizes ways to document institutional practices that are immediately implementable in the course development and review cycle.

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Let your data tell a story about your institution and your amazing students. This webinar illustrates strategies on optimal data presentation for reporting and institutional effectiveness. Topics include turning raw data into actionable information, understanding audience and intent, creating benchmarks and KPIs, dashboarding, tracking data, creating meeting summaries, and the power of visualizations. The session is presented through the lens of a DEAC-accredited institution’s institutional effectiveness strategies and implementation.

The one-hour webinar is now available on demand.

Data-informed conversations impact just about everyone who is involved institutional success and improvement. Effective strategies for gathering data in ways that faculty, administrators and staff members can use in their everyday work and contribute to these important decisions – whether they are data people or not – are central to demonstrating outcomes and to understanding what’s working at an institution and what’s not.

Within this webinar, Dr. Raymond Rodriguez focused on a high-level overview of why institutional effectiveness assessment is necessary; principles of educational assessment; the role of assessment in teaching and learning, differentiating diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments; differentiating evaluation, measurement, and assessment; and what constitutes evidence of the achievement of student learning.

This ninety-minute webinar is available on demand. 

Click here to view a recording of the webinar! 

In his previous webinar, Foundations of Institutional Assessment, Dr. Ray Rodriquez offered a high-level overview of why institutional effectiveness assessment is necessary; principles of educational assessment; the role of assessment in teaching and learning, differentiating diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments; differentiating evaluation, measurement, and assessment; and what constitutes evidence of the achievement of student learning.

DEAC and Dr. Rodriguez offered a follow-up to this webinar that took a deeper dive into answering the most basic question on institutional effectiveness: How do we know we are fulfilling our mission? How do we know our students are learning and growing? How do we document that we are achieving our institutional mission? How can we fully unleash our institution’s potential? Discussions and strategies on how to develop and organize your evaluation, assessment and improvement initiatives and effectively use data for institutional improvement were continued and deepened. These functions are key to institution research, academic program review, learning outcomes assessment, accreditation, and much more. 

The one-hour webinar is now available on demand.

Click here to view a recording of the webinar!

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is becoming an increasingly important priority for higher education. Informed DEI practices can provide institution leaders with deeper insights into how students, faculty and staff are experiencing the learning environment and help develop strategies to support a safe, inclusive and thriving academic experience at all levels within the institution.

There are many dimensions to DEI. With so many issues and so many opportunities to implement DEI initiatives, where do you start? How do you define a DEI goal? This webinar offered a framework for listening to the voices of your stakeholders and building DEI initiatives that included how to:

1. Develop a strategy to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in a way that uniquely reflects institution mission;

2. Gather data and measure outcomes to improve program effectiveness across all demographic groups; and

3. Create a leadership development strategy to improve the effectiveness of the institution in serving underrepresented groups.

This one-hour webinar, is available on demand.

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Click here to download a copy of the webinar slides!

DEAC’s accreditation process is extensive, comprehensive and rigorous. Passing the DEAC readiness threshold requires considerable time and resources. While many applicants who clear the readiness threshold go on to achieve initial accreditation, this outcome is never a certainty. It is important to fully comprehend all aspects of the institutional readiness assessment before deciding to apply to DEAC. This one-hour webinar offered a comprehensive overview of the DEAC readiness assessment process, which begins when an institution submits its initial Self-Study Report (SER).

Dr. Leslie Urofsky, DEAC’s Academic Review Specialist, and Ms. Mary Adams, President Emeritus, American Sentinel University, reviewed and discussed the purpose, procedures, outcomes, and challenges involved in this crucial gatekeeping step toward achieving DEAC accreditation. This webinar is designed to help applicant institutions understand what happens once the SER has been submitted as well as the “deemed ready” and “deemed not ready” findings. Attendees were provided with strategies and insight on how best to use the feedback report generated by the readiness evaluation and prepare for the next steps.

As educators we are used to evaluating information—papers, student questions, research articles. But viewing outcomes assessment through the lens of continuous quality improvement is remarkably difficult at first and we tend to make it so hard. DEAC accreditation standards, however; are quite clear: to be effective, outcomes assessment plans need to document, monitor and analyze student outcomes data to improve the student learning experience and inform institutional effectiveness.

This webinar addressed the fundamentals of outcomes assessment such as terminology, purpose, and processes, and offered suggestions for each development step along the way, leaving participants with an understanding of outcomes assessment in general, how to design an outcomes assessment plan that meets their institutional needs as well as how to use the data collected not only for continuous improvement but to meet the requirements for DEAC accreditation.

Click here to watch a recording of this one-hour webinar!

In recent years, many states have enacted various laws to protect students from unfair lending practices. While there are many lending options that can provide affordable institutional loan programs, there are many complexities to managing private lending that necessitate a deep understanding of compliance with state laws on lending practices. Understanding such regulations and the underlying reasons behind these rules can help institutions to better serve students and increase access and affordability for those who may otherwise be left behind. Furthermore, it is not as complicated as it may seem.

This webinar, which featured presenters from TFC Tuition Financing, discussed various regulations, including Truth in Lending Act (TILA) that institutions must adhere to when offering payments plans to students. Learn more about how proper and compliant financing programs present a win-win opportunity for students and their institutions.

The one-hour webinar is available on demand.

Click here to view a recording of the webinar!

The Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC) was pleased to host Dr. Cynthia Jackson-Hammond, the President of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), for a candid conversation about higher education policies, politics and leadership, as well as her long standing focus on student success, education quality, equity, and diversity. DEAC is very proud to be a CHEA-recognized accrediting organization.

Dr. Jackson-Hammond has been a member of the higher education community for over 30 years. Her professional career has included tenured and administrative positions in universities throughout various regions of the United States: University of Louisiana Monroe, California State University Dominguez Hills; Delaware State University; University of North Carolina Charlotte, Winston-Salem State University; and Coppin State University. Most recently, Dr. Jackson-Hammond completed her tenure as president of Central State University in Ohio.

She is a sought-after thought leader on accreditation, multicultural diversity and inclusion. Jackson-Hammond has served on many national boards including the Fulbright Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES); the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; NCAA Division II Presidents Council; American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. She has appeared several times on Capitol Hill providing testimony regarding the status of 1890 Land-Grant institutions.

This one-hour webinar is available on demand.

Click here to watch a recording of the webinar!

Students are well into their fall term. Some are studying fully online. Others are returning to campus after a year of online learning. Administrators, faculty, and staff are tentatively returning to their offices and classrooms, both online and in person. They all come to a familiar setting, but underneath all the excitement and trepidation are new rules, whether for vaccinations, social distancing, or new mandates that change day to day. Add to that the political positions on the pandemic and you have a combination of factors that impact the higher education community’s mental health and ability to learn and grow.

In this informative webinar, Dr. Perry C. Francis,  a professor of counseling and the coordinator of the Counseling Training Clinic at Eastern Michigan University, addressed the mental health challenges of returning to school in the midst of a pandemic and the uncertainty of infection in the face of ever-changing guidelines and politics. Participants were encouraged to consider not just the student as a learner, but as a developing adult who is preparing to enter society that struggles with how to care for one’s self and others.

This one-hour webinar is available on demand.

Click here to watch a recording of the webinar!