Annual Reporting for Academic Units
Beginning fall 2024, the Provost’s Office will change its previous annual program reporting process to an annual academic unit reporting process for all academic departments / divisions / schools (whatever the appropriate sub-college unit may be).
This annual academic unit reporting is aligned with and integrated into the Board of Governors (BOG) program review process and will help the Provost’s Office support dean's offices and their academic units and their faculty working to address unit and program viability, efficiency, and improvement.
The goals of this exercise are two-fold.
First, the process aims to empower department chairs and similar unit-level leaders to use data to inform changes to faculty staffing, program offerings, course scheduling, and curriculum and to improve student success.
Second, the process will ensure that the Provost's Office, college dean's offices, and academic units are proactively collaborating to address areas of potential enrollment and revenue growth as well as areas that are experiencing enrollment and revenue decline through resource allocation and reallocation.
Reports are reviewed by the relevant college dean's office and the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office reviews the submission of the annual reports to determine if any plans presented are untenable, identify top performing programs for recommendations for further institutional investment, as well as identify any units whose data and response to the data are concerning enough to warrant a full, off-cycle program review.
A preview link for this reporting process is available to those who wish to see what they will be asked to provide.
Process
Department chairs or similar academic leaders will use WVU's public Tableau dashboards (available via the Portal) to report how their unit metrics compare to an institutional benchmark range for each of the metrics listed below. Personnel in the dean's office or department chairs may request access to the dashboards by emailing The Office of Data Analytics.
- Enrollment: Five-year trend in the total headcount enrollment of all primary majors across all of the unit's programs and majors at all degree levels.
- The institutional benchmark range will be five percent above and below the five-year enrollment trend university baseline.
- SCH Production: Five-year trend in the unit's total SCH production across all course levels for all subject codes offered within the unit.
- The institutional benchmark range will be five percent above and below the five-year SCH production trend university baseline.
- Student-to-faculty FTE ratio: A ratio of the unit's total enrollment (see above) to its total faculty FTE.
- The institutional benchmark range will be 2 FTE above and below the relevant FTE baseline.
Units that are underperforming all three benchmarks are expected to provide an action plan that will address the unit's performance across all reported areas. These plans should address ways to improve the unit's enrollment and SCH production as well as plans to reduce address the unit's staffing levels (i.e., through attrition planning).
Units that are severely underperforming all three benchmarks may be asked to have some or all of their academic degree programs submit full program review self-studies to better determine what the cause of the underperformance is as well as to determine what institutional actions will be taken, if any.
In fall 2025, this process will be expanded to include unit-level metrics on revenue and cost.
Training for fall 2024's pilot with the WVU Morgantown main campus colleges and academic units will be held the following days and times:
- Tuesday, November 19, at 3pm in the Shenandoah Room (Mountainlair)
- Thursday, November 21, at 10am, in AER 120 (Evansdale)
- Monday, December 2, at 9am, in the Rhododendron Room (Mountainlair)
- Friday, December 6, at 3pm, in AER 120 (Evansdale)
The reporting process itself will then open Monday, December 9, 2024, and close on Friday, February 14, 2025.
Institutional Contacts
Questions about the annual program reporting process can be directed to Associate Provost
for Curriculum and Assessment at
louis.slimak@mail.wvu.edu.
Support for completing the report can be requested from Robynn Shannon, Director of Curriculum Development, or Darius Heffernan.
Requests for access to or questions about the data and data dashboards should be directed to dataoffice@mail.wvu.edu.