When you log in to Planning & Self Study by Watermark, you will see a page that looks like this, with dashboards for each organization- such as a program, co-curricular or administrative unit- for which you have been assigned as a lead contributor to enter assessment and planning data. Each dashboard includes links that take you directly to areas to enter specific content into, such as and assessment plan and mission statement. You may see multiple such dashboards if you have been assigned as a lead contributor for multiple organizations at your institution. If you do not see one or more organizations that you expect to see on your home page, please contact a Planning & Self-Study administrator at your institution for clarification.
As you work in Planning & Self-Study, if you need to return to your home page, you can usually locate a Home breadcrumb link in the upper left-hand corner of the page.
How to Map Outcomes
What is Outcomes Mapping?
If your organization has entered outcomes in Planning & Self-Study, you can map those outcomes to outcomes created by organizations above yours in your institutional hierarchy, to demonstrate alignment across different levels at an institution. Course outcomes can also be mapped to outcomes at different levels of an institution, such as program outcomes.
The most common use case is to map program outcomes to institution-wide outcomes, such as General Education outcomes. For this reason, this guide will focus on mapping organization outcomes to institution-wide outcomes. But a lead contributor for an organization can also follow the steps in this guide for similar use cases, such as mapping program outcomes to outcomes created by the college or department in which it nested, if those organizations have documented outcomes.
While this example focuses on mapping learning outcomes across different levels of an institution, success outcomes can also be mapped using the same instructions.
Create/Update an Outcome Map
Navigation from Home Page
To begin, first locate your program dashboard from your home page and click Enter Program on the right to navigate to your organization profile.
From the organization profile, click the Program Information tab in the navigation toolbar.
From the Information tab, scroll down to your Outcomes area, and click the Edit Outcome Map button to the right.
You will be taken to the outcomes mapping matrix for that organization.
Locate and Edit your Organization Outcomes
Your organization’s outcome set is located on the left-hand side of this matrix, listing the outcomes within it from top to bottom. If you need to edit your outcome set, click the icon of the pencil at the top of this list.
Locate Organizations to Map To
Across the top of the matrix from left to right are the organizations of your institution’s hierarchy in which your organization is nested. The left-most organization is the institution-wide level of your hierarchy, where your institution-wide outcomes will be documented.
Ability to hide Organizations in an Outcome Map
You can deselect and reselect organizations in the Outcome Map for a more specialized view of the organizations you want to map to. This allows organizations to make these maps clearer by taking out any organizations that don't have outcomes that need to be aligned.
In the above display we can see the organizations mapped by the user by clicking on the edit icon.
Upon clicking on the edit icon beside the organizations, a modal window opens where you can view the list of relevant organizations and include or exclude them from the map using a toggle.
Map Outcomes
To align one of an organization’s outcomes to the outcomes created in one of the organizations listed across the top of this matrix, click on the cell where that outcome intersects with an organization.
This will open a new panel to the right of your matrix, containing the outcome set for the organization you selected. If you don’t see outcomes for a certain level that you expect to see, please contact a Planning & Self-Study administrator at your institution for clarification.
Outcomes created at the institutional level which have been identified as General Education outcomes will have a Gen Ed label next to them.
To align your organization’s outcome to one or more of the outcomes in the selected organization’s outcome set, check the box to the right of those outcomes.
When you map one of your organization’s outcomes to an outcome in another organization, the mapping matrix will update with a checkmark to signify alignment between your outcome and that organization.
You can continue to map your organization’s outcomes to other outcome sets by clicking other matrix cells where an outcome intersects with another organization.
Save Changes
Once you have finished mapping your outcomes, click either the Create button (if this is your first time mapping outcomes) or the Update button (every time after the first) located in the upper right-hand corner of your page to save your changes and close the window and save your changes. Please note that if you close this page before clicking Create or Update, any changes you made will not be saved.
You will be returned to the Information tab of your Organization Profile, where you will see how many connections each of the organization’s outcomes has. You can click the Edit Outcome Map button to add additional mappings or edit existing ones.
