Waypoint Outcomes® has always had a special relationship with Drexel University. Our first higher education client was the Drexel Engineering Curriculum, and Waypoint is now used by faculty in business, arts and sciences, education, and nursing.

Because the College of Nursing focuses on writing and utilizes Blackboard to extend face-to-face courses, Waypoint was a natural. After using Waypoint for a number of terms, Dr. Fran Cornelius saw huge potential for Waypoint, not just to extend Blackboard and streamline feedback on all kinds of subjective assignments. She saw an opportunity to bring assessment into a new realm.

We recently visited Drexel University to observe nursing education in action. While Drexel has used Waypoint for several years, and the nursing program has used Waypoint to respond to written work, Dr. Fran Cornelius had always wanted to use interactive rubrics more broadly.

With their academic programs growing rapidly, efficiency and continuous improvement are primary concerns for faculty and administrators. To facilitate evaluation of nursing students who must demonstrate competency in performing complicated procedures, the Nursing program recently outfitted each exam room with an inexpensive netbook computer so that Waypoint could be utilized by faculty in ‘real-time’.

Given the large number of students, the process for evaluating performance must be well coordinated.  At Drexel, this involves 15 exam rooms in which every 30 minutes a new student begins a procedure. For example, the students may demonstrate their skills by inserting an IV into an eerily authentic simulated arm. The nursing faculty assess the students using a detailed rubric in Waypoint, and are able to send feedback and grades to the Blackboard grade center as the student is walking out the door. Students really appreciate the instant feedback, and the process makes it much easier to manage multiple simultaneous exam rooms and a day-long parade of students. If the student fails to demonstrate the skill satisfactorily, the rubric provides detailed feedback directing student to reference material that guides remediation. In addition, data on student achievement, which is immediately available to administrators, can be used to adjust the curriculum from week to week.

The next step for Dr. Cornelius and her colleagues is to drive data analysis down to the student level, and use the detailed information available in Waypoint to help academic advisors and course faculty address gaps in student knowledge in an individualized manner. "We could never collect this level of data on student achievement using other means," Dr. Cornelius said. "And our students are just impressed with the detailed feedback."