Recently, AQIP has seen quite a few examples of institutions taking dangerous risks, and not just with financial investments. We see processes that are critical to the welfare of both students and staff entrusted to people who, for a variety of reasons, “drop the ball” on their assignment — with disastrous consequences.

We’ve encountered institutions (a few, but far more than we should be finding) that have taken a cavalier attitude toward preparing their Systems Portfolio, submitting for review a disorganized, amateurish, or downright shoddy document — or a collection of them, spliced together hurriedly. We’ve encountered institutions that never update or retire an Action Project, complete Projects but fail to start new ones (as AQIP requires), even institutions where no one seems to be responsible or accountable for the things they need to do to keep their accreditation agency happy with them.

The reaction of Systems Appraisal teams to sloppy Portfolios is predictable: they are shocked, unsure whether the institution is negligently careless — or just plain incompetent. Generally, they don’t care which it is, and recommend that the institution doesn’t belong in a quality improvement program. Even when the carelessness occurs in a new AQIP institution’s first Portfolio, what these teams advise me is that the preparation of a slapdash Systems Portfolio is a very serious accreditation issue.

I used to resist this conclusion: after all, I reasoned neo-platonically, the institution we see projected in a Portfolio may not be the reality at the back of the cave. But as I encounter more carelessness of this sort, I’ve begun to rethink my reaction. A carelessly assembled Portfolio does signal an accreditation issue, but at a deeper level. A school with great teachers, good curriculum, and well educated students can, through neglect, turn in a bad Portfolio. That institution’s deeper problem, as I now see it, is that its leadership is paying too little attention to activities that, if done badly, can place the institution into jeopardy. Accreditation is the license required to operate a higher education institution, and blowing off accreditation can quickly demolish an institution.

During the 2010-2011 academic year the Higher Learning Commission will conduct a Quality Checkup visit to ten institutions as part of their participation in the Academic Quality Improvement Program. These are institutions that will undergo Reaffirmation of Accreditation in the 2011-2012 academic year.

• Allen County Community College, Iola, KS
• College of Saint Mary, Omaha, NE
• Dakota State University, Madison, SD
• Lamar Community College, Lamar, CO
• Lewis University, Romeoville, IL
• North Arkansas College, Harrison, AR
• North Central State College, Mansfield, OH
• Northern Wyoming Community College District, Sheridan, WY
• Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, OH
• Urbana University, Urbana, OH

Quality Checkups typically begin Wednesday at noon and end Friday at noon, and involve a two-person team visiting the campus or headquarters to meet with various groups from the institution. Specific planning for the visit — creation of an agenda and your preparation of materials for the team — will begin late this spring or next fall, depending on the specific date each visit is scheduled. These are positive, affirming visits, important but not stressful, and used well can give the institution an opportunity to invigorate its quality improvement efforts and deepen the benefits it gets from involvement in AQIP. The visit can also help assure everyone — both institution and HLC — that the institution’s reaccreditation in the year following the visit will go smoothly, that it meets all of HLC’s accreditation expectations fully. The Quality Checkup is not a visit that makes a determination on accreditation, but it can help put any anxieties concerning accreditation to rest.

The Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) created its Action Project Directory in 2002, soon after holding its first Strategy Forums. We designed the Directory so institutions could share their Action Projects — both their specific goals and their strategies for achieving them — with other educators. We found that having institutions formally declare their intentions for improvement projects made it easier for them to follow through and achieve the goals they had set for themselves.

AQIP uses the Action Project Directory to assure itself that participating institutions are always actively working on three or more focused improvement projects and that each participating institution is serious about AQIP. Consequently, we rely on the Directory to tell us when an institution has stopped working actively on improvement — when it ought to withdraw from AQIP and seek a reaccreditation process that does not require this overt commitment to continuous improvement.

In the seven years since we first created the Action Project Directory, we have discovered many things we wish had been incorporated in the original design (like having it signal us when an institution continues an Action Project long beyond its original target date for completion, or doesn’t create new projects to replace those it has completed). We also discovered complexities in using it (like making people call us when they forget their password) that we could have avoided with better design.

Since its beginnings, AQIP has worked to promote collaboration among the colleges and universities that participate, recognizing that one of the best values it can provide its members is the experience, knowledge, and innovative ideas of their colleagues across the 19-state North Central Association region. Laboring together in untangling problems and capitalizing on opportunities, higher education organizations are pleasantly surprised by the synergy that cooperative efforts can create at little or no cost.

To promote more creative collaboration, AQIP is adding a new Forum to its website: Action Projects. This open, unmoderated discussion group has two purposes. One is to give AQIP institutions a mechanism to gather and provide feedback on each other's Action Projects, particularly at the formative, planning stage. Using it is simple: start a new thread — a series of email comments tied together by a single theme — and describe your idea for a new Action Project. Or read an existing thread, and add to it a posting with your insights, advice, and comments on some other institution’s ideas for a new Action Project. (Strategy Forums provide another opportunity to gather guidance and questions from others about potential Action Projects, but the need to start a new Action Project doesn’t always coincide with a Strategy Forum.)