Assessment of SAP program

[Former Member]

What are the best ideas for evaluating or assessing the SAP education program(s) that you have at your school? In other words, how do you evaluate what you have as meeting student objectives or program goals?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

We had a lively discussion on this topic and agreed on a number of ideas. The first conclusion is that the assessment of your program would depend to some extent on the drivers that led you to start the program. If it was in response to prodding by an advisory board, then getting the advisory board involved with program assessment would probably be a good idea. On the other hand, if the program was started to attract students from other departments into a minor, then the number of students from other departments taking the courses would be an obvious metric.

We did however identify a number of generally useful metrics:

1. Number of students taking the courses and/or getting the certificate.

2. Number of classes/courses offered.

3. Number of faculty involved in the program.

4. Level of employer interest measured either as the number of employers interviewing students or the number of students hired.

5. Number of students taking and passing the TERP10 exam.

6. Level of scholarly output (e.g. papers in conferences or journals)

Another conclusion was that most institutions have an existing assessment program and the assessment of the SAP initiative can often be integrated with these efforts.

Thanks to all who participated in our discussion. I hope I've represented it accurately.

Ross

[Former Member]

Another thought would be being able to use the software for cross-faculty collaboration and teaching. A number of my universities have begun to cross polinate by having their business school teach courses in collaboration with their engineering school and so on. In some cases the practical offshoot of this has been that universities that were strapped for cash have been able to get a business school to invest in BW and teach balanced scorecard, and the engineering or manufacturing school has invested in ERP/IDES and taught operational constraints.

But by acting jointly both schools have been able to acquire both products (because of the university-level licence) and then develop courses whereby engineering students get a basic overview of balanced scorecard and vice versa.

This is certainly a 'softer' benefit of the program and the software but it's a valuable one. In certain cases there may be two faculties that have in the past had a great difficulty in develoiping any form of collaboration because of the lack of a perceived common area of interest and then by using the software were able to bring those faculties together - and teaching collaboreation may lead to research collaboration and joint funding proposals.

Martin

Martin Gollogly

Director, University Alliances

United Kingdon and Ireland

[SMagal]

Here are some thoughts to spark a discussion.

We can look at assessment from three perspectives - students, university, and business community (other perspectives, such as parents, may also be appropriate).

From the student perspective, the immediate value is in becoming extremely marketable. Our students, who have taken the appropriate ERP/SAP courses, completed the TERP 10 certification, etc. are highly recruited - for internships and full-time employment. This, in turn, attracts more students to our program. So measures such as number of interviews, number of site visits, number of offers, may be appropriate.

From the business community perspective, the value is in terms of finding interns and full-time employees who are immediately productive and can help further the organization's goals. Our program has a strong business process focus, includes significant SAP learning, and also emphasizes soft skills, such as communication and collaboration. Consequently graduates are able to contribute from day one. This reduces training costs, down time, and turnover. Some studies have attempted to measure this value - the references escape me at the moment!

For universities, the value is in the reputation of delivering highly and appropriately skilled graduates. This results in increased enrollments and stronger collaboration with business the business community. One can measure this in terms of number of students enrolled/graduated and the number of employers recruiting on campus. Another measure could be the number of courses and faculty involved in the program. Longer term value is in building strong ties with the business community leading to collaboration in teaching (adjuncts, speakers, mentors, etc.) , curriculum development (ideas for cases, assignments, etc.), and financial contributions to the program.