Watermark Planning & Self-Study

Watermark Planning & Self-Study is a solution to drive continuous improvement with unified planning, assessment, and outcomes data. It creates an integrated hub for managing strategic planning and assessment reporting across campus. The solution supports program review, self-study, and outcomes assessment, while creating a data repository that allows for comparison and measurement year-over-year.

TrustRadius Research Team Analysis

What is Watermark Planning and Self-Study?

Watermark Planning and Self-Study (P&SS) is a software package for accreditation management and evaluating institutional effectiveness for higher education institutions. The package focuses on the production of four main reports: Accreditation Self-Studies, Program Reviews, Strategic Plans, and Assessment Plans. This analysis will show the main functionality and key features of Watermark P&SS and show how some of those features compare to key competitors.

Organization Management

While definitely not the most glamorous feature of P&SS, organization management may be its most important feature. Organization management provides the ability to assign hierarchical structures within an institution, from divisions and colleges down to individual courses. An example is shown below:

Granular Permissions

Outcomes, Measures, and Actions

Associated with Outcomes are Measures and Actions. Measures serve as ways of determining the success or failure of an outcome. Available Measures for learning Outcomes are shown below:

Actions are used to plan how to achieve Outcomes or improve Measures. Available Actions for learning Outcomes are shown below:

Cyclical Assessment Planning

The creation screen for a new measure is shown below


Finally, Results can be attached using one of four different methods, as shown below.

Self-Studies

Program Reviews

Strategic Planning

For every Strategic Priority, you can have one or more Strategic Goals

Data Importing

Data importing in P&SS requires files to be CSVs with UTF-8 encoding. This is the standard for data import files across a number of accreditation packages, including Weave and SPOL. It is also a standard file type option in Excel and other spreadsheet software, as shown below, and a typical export option for a wide variety of programs, including LMS and SIS systems.

After uploading the CSV(s) to the import tool, each file will be checked for errors. If errors are found, one or more error codes will be reported, and it will be necessary to edit the appropriate files. P&SS’s error codes are fairly straightforward and specific enough to check for quickly.

While CSV imports might be a little last decade for some types of software, they are standard among accreditation tools. P&SS’s tool is relatively strong. Many other programs, such as Weave, have relatively small limits on their file upload size (Weave’s import tool can only upload 1000 lines per file). In contrast, P&SS’s import tool can handle up to 20,000 lines. This can significantly reduce the tedium and time commitment of uploading large datasets.

Additionally, P&SS’s error checking is a huge boon. First, simply having error checking included in the import process is great. The alternative is finding that something didn’t work several weeks into your process and not being sure what the source of the error is. P&SS instead gives you a fairly specific error message to help you locate the error (although providing a row number for the CSV would speed this process significantly).

Report Exporting, Publishing, and Distribution

This method of publishing is great for distributing the Self-Study to internal and external stakeholders without the annoyance of distributing the PDF and supporting documentation. Additionally, the web version comes with nice formatting, sidebars, and links, which makes for a better reader experience.

The publishing option that really sets P&SS apart is web publishing, which is much more advanced than its competitors. Although not terribly useful for most accreditation processes, it is an excellent way to share information on institutional effectiveness with both internal and external stakeholders. The ability to use even basic web features such as scrolling and link navigation makes it much easier to read the report online as opposed to in a PDF.

Document Management

Those documents can then be linked as a portion of the report, as shown below.

Collaboration

Beyond the structural elements that facilitate collaboration among the appropriate people, the tool that P&SS uses for collaboration is a chat/comment function. For every section within a report, there will be a comments section.

Support

Integrations

Use Case

Unlike many other software fields, there is not a lot of variance in the core functionality of accreditation management and institutional effectiveness software. These packages are designed to produce reports with fairly stringent formatting requirements, and there are only so many ways to do that. Many packages in the space, Watermark P&SS included, check all those boxes.

However, that does not mean that Watermark P&SS is the same as its competitors. What sets it apart is several convenience and quality-of-life features, such as:

• The data import tool has a robust error checker to prevent bigger problems later in the process
• The data import tool has a significantly higher line limit than some competitors
• Web publishing of the Self-Study and Curriculum mapping allows for more efficient distribution of more user-friendly versions of these documents to internal and external stakeholders besides the accreditation organization.

These features, and the general user experience, are what help Watermark Planning and Self-Study stand out from other competitors in the accreditation management and institutional effectiveness space.