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welcome to the a Chelsea's assurance system training during this training you will learn how to access the assurance system how to write an assurance argument within the system and how to upload documents to the systems evidence file Jan Smith from Pittsburg State University will be presenting the training Pittsburg State University was one of the pioneer institutions that tested the assurance system Jan is very familiar with the assurance system and assisted in its development she will guide users through the process of creating an assurance filing and will offer tips on getting the most out of the assurance system welcome everyone I'm pleased to be able to go over the assurance system with you today I'm at Pittsburg State University and we really have loved using the assurance system it really transformed our work once we got access to the system we found it to have some really helpful features but at the same time be very simple to use so I think the Commission has found a very nice balance in terms of those two things I'll be throwing a lot of information at you today but once you get in the system you really will see just how easy it is to use so don't worry if you don't remember every single thing that I say once you get in the system it really will be very straightforward to navigate your way around there are a couple of things to keep in mind as I'm giving this overview first of all this training is about using the assurance system not about writing the assurance argument and I'll show you a draft of our assurance narrative as I illustrate some of the features of the system but that shouldn't be considered the right information if you have any questions about content of your assurance argument then check directly with Commission staff the other thing and demonstrating the features of the system I'll be showing you some ways that we've chosen to use the assurance system at our institution and I do think we found some good ways to make the system work for us but that doesn't mean you have to do everything the same way so I'll make sure that I point out whenever something reflects our preference rather than an HLZ or system requirement and the online assurance system was developed to facilitate the creation of and submission of your assurance argument and the system has been developed so that each institution can file their assurance arguments with no additional technology I know that some of the pioneer institutions have bought additional technology and have found that to be helpful we did not purchase anything else we did all of our work within this assurance system that I'm showing you and found that it did everything that we needed and work great the system can be accessed using most major web browsers one thing I would point out if you're a Mac user it's recommended that you use Safari or Chrome not Firefox if you're a PC user it doesn't matter but again if you're a Mac user Firefox is not recommended because there are some features that don't work so well with Firefox so if your Mac user Safari or Chrome is recommended we chose to complete our work entirely within the assurance system and I initially started out writing in Word and just pasting into the system but very quickly switch to working entirely within the system but as we go over the various features you can decide what works best for you and the home page just provide some basic information about the process as well as a place to enter your login information and the first time you log into the system you'll want to change your password from the temporary one to provide it and in order to do this simply click on the down arrow beside your name in the top right hand corner and you'll get the option to change a password there are two main types of users or roles in the assurance system the first of the contributor who have access to edit the assurance argument and can add evidence to the evidence file the other type of user is the system coordinator and the system coordinator has the same rights as a contributor in terms of being able to edit the argument in that file but the system coordinator can also do a number of other things and I'll walk us through all of these different aspects the system coordinator can also edit the introduction page they can create additional users in the system and you can have a total of up to 15 users in the system at one time and up to three of those can be system coordinators we went with two system coordinators so we always had a spare coordinator round if someone without the towel and we needed something but you can have up to three of fifteen total B system coordinators the system coordinators can also assign users and due dates and the system coordinator is also the person who eventually locks the assurance argument which signals to HLC that you're done with your creation of the argument and ready for review there's also the option to have somebody access the system in read-only mode that means they can see everything in the system they just can't upload files or make any changes to the assurance argument or anything like that they literally can just view everything that does count against your 15 so your total of 15 you can distribute to any way you want keeping in mind that up to three of them can be system coordinators we use the read-only mode for example to distribute the document to our president he was not involved in writing the argument what was highly involved in the accreditation process and giving feedback and so this was a great way to give him access and have him be able to take a look at all of our materials and at our institution we had an HLZ accreditation leadership team working on the assurance argument and that team consisted of 11 members plus an administrative support person some of the other pioneers had larger teams some of them actually had smaller teams we opted to give everyone on the team access as a contributor and I learned very quickly however that it's really important for one person to have overall responsibility and make sure that everyone's role within the system is well defined so if you have an inner control freak this is a good time to let it blossom and make sure that you spell out what you would like each person to do and what you would not like each person to do and one thing we did is I declared open season for a few days when we got access to the system and I think that worked really well we just let people go in and do whatever they wanted in the system playing around uploading files I text and then after a certain date I cleared everything out and let people know that they didn't do anything else in the system and to collect their they lack or requested to do so and I think that worked well some of the other pioneer institutions opted to have considerably fewer people with access to the system so if you prefer you could easily have people involved in the preparation of your assurance argument outside of the system and then just have a couple of people who actually enter information into the system I thought it was just much more efficient to do everything within the system though it just avoided having to keep track of emails and all different versions and there is a way to access previous versions that I'll show you in case someone gets a little carried away and you need to be able to see an earlier version of the argument right now I'm logged in as a system coordinator so I can point out the administration features to those of you assigned to this role but when you're logged in is either a contributor or a system coordinator you'll see a tab for introduction a tab for evidence file assurance argument forms and help and those of you that have a system coordinator role will also have an administration tab when you first log into the system you'll automatically be taken to this assurance argument view but I want to take us through a couple of the less involved sections before we get to the evidence file and assurance arguments which are really the meat of the training so I'm going to start with the administration tab because several of you attending the webinar will have a system coordinator role so let me show you this feature this is where you can add users to the system and assign or modify roles if you are the designated system coordinator for your institution when HLC gives you access to the system they'll put you into the system automatically but then you'll need to go to this area to give access to others at your institution and it's really easy to do to give someone access to the system simply click on this new user button in the top right corner and then we'll be prompted to add an email address the nice thing is the system does so much work for us including sending an email automatically to the person once you give them access to the system so I'm going to click cancel because I don't want to send random emails to people adding them to the system but if you wanted to add somebody you would hit check instead and if you select the check then you would get a screen like this and you would need to enter the first name of the individuals and last name and then there's a drop down menu where you can select what role you want to give them read-only contributor assistant coordinator and if anytime you want to change their role promote or demote them you can so you can go back into any point and change their role you can also make them inactive at any point simply by unchecking the box and you can delete somebody from the system so perhaps if they move to a different institution no longer with you or no longer working on the accreditation process you can delete them from the system if somebody is in in one of these three roles they do count towards your total of 15 but if they are inactive or deleted those no longer count towards your total of 15 I'm just going to click cancel because I didn't make any changes but obviously you would need to hit save and again only the system coordinators will be able to add new users to the system or edit those roles the next section I'd like to show is the introduction section in this area of the site allows for a brief description of your institution and you may also opt to include a photograph or image to personalize the page and when the review team access is your assurance argument they'll land on this introduction page only the system coordinators can edit the introduction page but anybody can view it with access to the system and one of the things we chose to do was have our president write this section because that gave him a voice in the assurance argument that was our preference though that's not a system or HLC requirement to add information to this area the system coordinator will have an edit button simply hit the edit button and you'll get a text box where you can either type things in or you can copy and paste this is also where you add an image if you'd like to if you decide you want to add it add an image simply hit select and then that will take you to files to browse select the image you want to upload and that will show up if you decide you don't want that image at any point you can clear it out there we'll keep in mind that there are specifications for file size and type so if you're working with your external communications or marketing people make sure they know what these specifications are because that will restrict the files that they can send to you that will be of use to you a lot of the pioneer institutions chose to put a photograph of that president there but you don't have to you don't even have to include a photo if you don't want to when you've completed anything do make sure you hit save because there is not an automatic save feature let me stress that again there is not an autosave feature that may sound a little disappointing to you but the reason for it is that when I show you these insurance argument you'll see that files are actually linked to the narrative and the autosave does not do well with that linking files aspect so even though it means you have to remember to save frequently at least you always know what files are linked and which ones are not linked you'll see now that the image has shown up it does default to this area of the page and you cannot move it around and note that this is the only place you can opt to include an image and in some ways that may seem a little restrictive we actually found that to be a huge relief because then we didn't have to worry about pictures or videos or anything fancy it let us concentrate fully on the content of the assurance argument so that's the introduction section this does not count against your total would count for your assurance argument but it is designed to be short just a one-page kind of deal let me show you the forms tab next this is another just short section and this is where you're going to upload your federal compliance or any other forms that you're required to submit at the time of submission of your assurance argument and to submit your federal compliance you'll first of all need to download the federal compliance form and there is a little button you can press to access that then this is one area where you do need to work outside of the system so you'll need to complete your federal compliance form outside of the system then save it as a PDF and upload it and you'll simply click on the upload button and then select the file which you want to upload and I'm going to just cancel out also if you have supporting evidence you'll want to save that into PDF files as supporting evidence to be a federal compliance and upload those files here as well if there are any other forms you need to use this will be the section where you'll be able to do that and then the other feature I want to just show you really quickly another quick tab is the help tab and there are a number of useful resources here if you want documentation about pathways in general there is a link to access material about pathways there's also a link to videos on how to use the system and there will be a video of this training available in a couple of weeks I think this is a really nice feature quite honestly we ended up not using the videos at our institution because once we got in the system we found it was just so easy to use that we didn't need this resource but it is there for you was a resource if you do get into the system and forget how to do something or get stuck if you have any questions that aren't answered through these voice resources then there is a way to get assistance and the commission requests that you coordinate that through your system coordinator so system coordinators can click on this link and it will take them to a form to fill out and then that form will be routed to the appropriate person HLC and you'll get a response also if you have issues that are technical in nature anyone using the system can request assistance using the link to the technical assistance form it is us that you do this through the system because it keeps a helps hoc keep a record off any difficulties people are encountering plus it make sure your request goes to the right forum so it will facilitate a speedy response and one of the things I found is I use this feature a lot when we were beta testing the system and the Commission was extremely responsive and getting back very quickly when you do complete this form it will ask you some for some information about the browser you're using and and those kinds of things so do be as specific as you can in providing information because that will assist in getting you the kind of response that you need to resolve any challenges and then there's just a couple of other things on technical requirements and the glossary of terms so those are the really easy tabs before we get to the more involved evidence file and assurance argument what I'm going to do next to show you a bird's-eye view of the evidence file and assurance argument so you can see how they fit together and then I'll double back and go over the nuts and bolts of actually creating folders and uploading files as well as the nuts and bolts of adding text and linking files to the assurance argument so let's take a look at the evidence file the evidence file houses all of your specific documents that you may choose to reference and link to narrative in your assurance argument one of the things to keep in mind is that only PDF document can be uploaded into the evidence file if you have a word document or a document in any other format it first need to be converted to PDF prior to uploading also a Chelsea will preload evidence in an a Chelsea documents folder that you may wish to reference in your assurance argument and we'll go over the process of creating these folders and uploading documents in much more detail in a few minutes but I wanted to show you this area of the site because you have to first put documents here before you can reference them and make use of them in your assurance argument so let's take a look at an overview of the assurance argument component and the assurance system will be preloaded with the five criteria and all the core components as well as an area for adding summary information after each criterion and the core components and criteria that are loaded those words do not count against your total word count for your assurance argument the summary section if you choose to add a summary section that does count towards your total would count for the assurance argument it is optional we chose to make use of the summary section as a way to pull over all of the core components together to the criterion level and we also found it helpful to do a self analysis where we looked at what we considered to be off strengths and our areas for improvement but again that's our preference not something you have to do to read through the criteria for accreditation you can simply click on any of the criteria or core components so let me go to one where we've added some information to the demo site so if I go to criterion 3 you can see it helps me what the criterion is and notice there isn't any way we can add information to this section but I can either go back to the dashboard or I can simply scroll backwards and forwards using the arrows at the top left and right and notice that the core components and subcomponents will be already entered into the system for you and then you'll be able to edit all of the core components in the summary section to add information and this is what it will look like to your reviewer they will see the text that you add with active links to the files you put into your evidence file and link to your document there will also be at the end of the section the end of a core component a list of all of the sources that you've referenced in a particular core component and your reviewers will see this list but there won't be a resource room your reviewer if they want to see anything about more about the supporting evidence you're providing as they're reading through the argument they can simply click onto a active link and that will take them directly to a piece of evidence and you can take them to the beginning of a document or you can take them to a specific page within a document and that will open for them in a separate window anytime you want to go back to that dashboard view you can click on insurance argument or you can click on return to dashboard so let me show you some more features of the dashboard and we'll double back and show you how to add narrative and linked files in a little while in the middle of the dashboard there's a status indicator column and the dashboard really has some very nice features from a project management viewpoint and it really did transform our work when we got access to the system the system will take care of a lot of things for you from an organizational standpoint the status indicator will tell you at a glance where things are at with the argument and there's a little key at the top to tell you what the icons mean ranging from not started through in process ready for review and completed and you can also hop in your icon over any of these icons and it will tell you what it means note that these are internal indicators and they signify to your team working on this where things are that they are not signifying signifying anything to a Chelsea or your review team in order to change the status indicator you do that within a core component so you would just simply click on a core component click Edit there's a little drop-down menu and you can change from not started to in process ready for review completed wherever your app so I can put that in process I can save it I've got a little safe successful sign and then I can just go ahead and check in and close I'm going to check in but I'll show you what those mean and then I can go back to my dashboard view and we can see that terrain now the status symbol has changed for us and anybody can change that status symbol if they have a contributor or system coordinator right the next column of the due date and assigned user and only the system coordinators can assign due dates and assigned users you don't have to give a due date you don't have to give an assigned user but it's very helpful for keeping track if you have for groups or individuals working on specific core components and to assign a due date or find user the system coordinator simply click on a core component so I'll go back to 2a click on edit again and you can either type in a due date or you can select it from a calendar the nice thing is you find users you'll have a drop down menu and anybody that you've entered into the system will be in this drop down menu and you can select whoever you want from that drop down menu save it check it back in and the system will automatically send an email to the individual you've assigned telling them they've been assigned a core component and what the due date is if they go over the due date then it will turn red and a little exclamation point so they get a friendly reminder that they know something is viju that was really helpful because it saved me tracking down people a lot if somebody is an assigned user for particular core components that signaling that they are the person that has the major responsibility for this section but anybody on the team can still go and head and take a look at that section so they can access it they can also still edit it unless they're a read-only mode so we want to make sure that we don't have people working on the same thing at one time and that's where the checked out feature comes in if you have a section open and you're working on it it's automatically checked out to you when you save it and finish working on it you can either keep it checked out to you which is telling your team members I'm not done with this yet so don't mess with it I'm still working on it or you can check it back in which will allow your team members to work on it oh if it is checked out a little icon appears in the checked out column you get a little purple icon and you can hover over that to see who it's checked out to so if somebody has had a section checked out for some time and you want to be able to work on it you can see who has that section and then you can email them there are active links to email just click on the person's name within the system and that will send them an email and you can send them a request to check it back in again the system coordinator can also check it back in and we did find that there were times when people had something Chatwood checked out and they had just simply forgotten to check it back in again so this is a feature that prevents us from being able to overwrite each other's work and it's just like a library book of it's checked out nobody else can do anything with it other than be able to look at it the next column final column is the word count column and there is a recommended word count for open pathway and your pathway will be displayed in the top left-hand corner off the dashboard for the open pathway the recommended word count is 35,000 words if you go over the word count you aren't locked out of the system and you aren't prevented from adding any words but this will work town will come read to show you that you've gone over the recommended word count we came in I think 21 words under the recommended word count so we were determined to say you can write an insurance argument and 35,000 words or less you'll see that as well as the total word count at the top there are also word counts associated with each section and notice that there's quite a bit of variability in the word count from section to section the system is not set up where you are allotted a specific number of words in each section you can use your word count however you would like to do so and so you will naturally find that some sections are longer than others and some criteria will be longer than others for example criterion while I'm on mission for most institutions will be very straightforward and will tend to be a shorter section whereas when you get into criteria three and four on teaching and learning we found that those are much more involved for our institutions and a lot longer all of the columns are sortable so you can simply click on them and they will sort the information in that column you can click on the column again and it will reverse the order so this is a nice feature if you found you've gone over that word count and we did go over the word count a couple of times and have to scale back then this gives you a quick glance you can see where you've been most wordy and where you might want to consider cutting some words anytime you want to go back to the original view simply click on the number column and it will revert back to the original order of things a couple of other features that I'd like to show you on the dashboard before we stop and see what any questions there is an export print button and this allows you to export the assurance argument into either a word or a PDF file and keep in mind that this is a printable file I'm not sure what I did there I guess I just put accidentally move something that my apologies this is a printable file therefore it will not include all of the evidence file documents so if you save a printable file and share it with others electronically by an email for example those who have a login to the system will be prompted to login if they click on any of the evidence file source links and if I'm perfectly honest this is probably the feature that I found least helpful because we did use the export print to a Word or PDF document to distribute it to campus but having those links in there was not helpful to us because I figured it would be frustrating for people to click on a link to evidence and be prompted to add them into their login information and then I figured it would be even more frustrating when they contacted me and requested login information only to be told that I couldn't provide them with that because of that limit of 15 people in the system so when we sent this document out for example to the campus for review I went ahead and stripped all of those active links out so that people wouldn't even prompted to provide any login information they didn't have and I just googled it but and you can do the same but just to save you doing that if you want to disable all the active hyperlinks you can do that all at once rather than have to remove each one individually simply hit ctrl a and that will select all of it and then you can hit ctrl shift and f9 and that will strip all of those hyperlinks at one time so again hit ctrl a to select all and then ctrl shift and f9 and that will strip out those hyperlinks you don't have to do it we just found that worked well for us the other feature on your dashboard view this is where your lock button is and this is where the system coordinator will submit the argument for review and only the system coordinator has this lock button to submit for review you want to make sure that you are completed with your work before you hit this button because once you lock the assurance argument there is not a way for you to go back in the system and unlock it so if you lost this accidentally if it's prior to your review date you can contact HLC and request that they unlock it if you if it's past your review date HLC will not be able to unlock it for you because it will already have gone to your reviewers and so cannot be unlocked your lock date will be displayed at the top left-hand side of your page you might see a rather funky date when you first access the system because that lock date is dependent on your next review and if your next review isn't scheduled then there are some dummy dates in there for some institutions just to be able to give you access to the system but if you have any questions about your lock date you can always contact HRC if you do not submit by your lock paper system will lock for you I believe you have until 11:59 p.m. central time to lock I would not recommend testing out that hypothesis I think that would be a little stressful to get that close to the wire and I would actually recommend locking about a week ahead of time we ended up locking on a lock state and we were confident that we had everything ready to go as we went to lock we realized we were missing a piece of supporting evidence for our federal compliance we were fine we were still able to lock that morning but it did mean scrambling and it caused unnecessary stress so in future I just plan on walking a week early so if anything like that comes up I can take care of it as a much more leisurely pace but again if you don't lock by your lock date the system will automatically lock for you so those are some of the main features of the dashboard review before we double back and look at how to do the nuts and bolts of each of these sections well let's go back to the evidence file and we looked at this briefly before but let's take a closer with look at how to work within the evidence file again only documents that are uploaded to the evidence file can be referenced in your insurance argument so the evidence file is a really important part of the site furthermore only documents that are referenced in your assurance argument can be viewed by your review team anything you put in there will not be accessible to your review team all your review team will see is the HLC documents they can't see anything in that folder but they will not see anything else in the evidence file that you have added all of these folders you add will be ghosted out so it's critical that you upload information here and then make sure that you reference it in your assurance argument there are three main categories of evidence in the evidence file and the first is official HLC documents already preloaded into the system when you first get access to the system you'll see a folder with the name of your institution and there'll be another folder that says HLC documents these will already be there you can simply click on the HLC documents folder to see what's being put in there and if you want to take a look at what any of these documents are you can simply click on the document and click on view file and it will open for you in a separate window you don't have to do anything with them but you can choose to reference them if you would like to you are not able to modify or delete these documents so even if you don't really care for them you're not able to get rid of them again though you don't need to do anything with them they're just available for your use the second category of evidence is URL sources and these can be found at the bottom of the page and notice that there are only six predetermined types of websites that you can use in order to add a URL source you simply click the edit button and paste in the relevant link and save it so if I want to add for example something to my class schedule I can hit edit I can go to my class schedules page simply copy the URL paste it in hit save and now it shows up I strongly encourage you to hit view make sure it is where you want your reviewer to go if at any time you want to change it you can edit it again and make any changes you want I'm just going to hit cancel because they didn't make any changes you do not have to provide all of these documents and web-based form if you have these in a PDF format you might choose to use them in a PDF format and in fact that's what we did for example all faculty handbook we have in a PDF on that the reason why it would be invitation to upload something in a PDF format rather than take your reviewer to the website is that when you use a website then the reviewer only goes to that beginning page of the website so example with my course catalog if I were to take my reviewer to that they come to this welcome page for the catalog if I wanted to take them to my general ed requirements for example they would to navigate their themselves I could not send them to a particular place within the website they would have to navigate there however if I upload it in a PDF format I would have them option of taking them to the page where the general ed requirement or whatever if I wanted them to land on happen to be so it's up to you whether you use these in a URL format or not but these are the only six websites you can use and you do have to put the website here in the evidence file you can't just copy and paste the URL into the assurance argument itself it may seem overly restrictive that you can only have these things as a website but we need to make sure that our evidence is archivable and think about how many times have you clicked on the link to a website and it no longer works the website isn't there the websites are too dynamic to be able to archive them however the Commission does recognize that some things change at the faster pace to institutions so far example class schedules they change on an ongoing basis and that's why they allow these websites to be used any other websites you want to use you also need to convert to PDF format and we kind of struggled with that a little bit because we found out that most of our documents are on the web we almost do too big of a job of putting everything on the web and so we had to find a way to capture web-based information into a PDF document we started out by just doing little screenshots and quickly abandoned that idea because the quality just was not there it was really fuzzy and difficult to read when it was saved as a PDF and we operated with the assumption that we did not want to irritate or annoy our reviewers so we quickly changed to a different way of capturing websites and there are lots of different free and commercial software's out there that you can use to both of website to a PDF we happen to go with Adobe Acrobat Pro that was our choice to do that not something you have to do however you want to do it is up to you but you will need to capture other web-based information that's not one of these allowable URL sources and convert it into a PDF if you choose to use that information one thing to keep in mind too is that there is a maximum file size for uploading files and it's a fairly generous file size it's 50 megabytes but if you have something that's larger than this you will need to break it down into a couple of smaller files and I think there was really only one or two instances we had to do that you may find that you're bumping up against that file limit and it's taken a while for a file to upload if that happens you may still decide to break that file down into a couple smaller files even though you within the allowable size limit because if something's taking a while to upload keep in mind that it means it will take a while to download on the other end for the reviewers again don't annoy or irritate your reviewers make life easier for them and keep them happy this file size did influence some of the things we did or didn't do for example one of our pioneer institutions mentioned that you can capture videos in a PDF file and I didn't know whether to be really excited about that or overwhelmed because we have a great videographer but when I talked to him it became a non-issue very quickly because that file limit would mean that the videos would be so small and short and grainy that it was not going to be effective to be able to embed a video and so we did not go down that path any other file so that are not in these URL allowable websites you do have to convert to PDF before you upload and a couple of things that I'll mention that we kind of found helpful when we were creating files to upload one problem we encountered when we were identifying evidence is that we have no consistent format for our documents and you may do better than that of your institution and have everything in a nice tidy standard format but we did reasonably okay with our major documents but with some of our smaller documents they really will not do it in terms of prominently displayed title or even name of our institution so we got around that by putting a cover sheet on each of our documents let me show you an example here's an example of a cover sheet again you don't have to do this you don't have to use the file naming convention I show you these are just things we found that made our life easier and worked well for plus the feedback we had from our reviewers and I actually served as a reviewer for another pioneer institution and they used an evidence document cover sheet and I loved it it was great having an orientation to the document so we just did a little bit of branding to show that it was from a university and give it a consistent look we put the title of the document where it was from and then just a quick summary that oriented the reviewer to what the content of the document was one of the other things we found is that the files we gathered had all manner of weird and wonderful names and so we spent time up front coming up with a file naming convention and I would strongly strongly strongly advise you to do the same thing because there are a number of reasons one when you link files to evidence in the assurance argument you need to be able to see at a glance what a file is I'm not going a treasure hunt and if your institution is anything like ours files you get will have all men of weird and wonderful names it might be a string of seemingly random digits it might say buying final version seven pages it might be Michaels document things that don't mean anything to you so you're probably going to want to rename them also your reviewer will see that list of the file names at the end of the core component sections anything you've linked to that section so even though they don't see the content of your folders in the evidence file did you see that list at the end so you want names that are meaningful to your reviewers and professional and us also this has the potential to be a living document when you submit your assurance argument but once you've hit lock you can still access the system and review review and view everything in there you just can't make changes however once the review is completed you can go back in and you can make changes you can either wipe everything out or you can use what you have at the base point and turn this into a living document and update things and then if you have things named that makes that easier then that will help things in the long term so we recruited the help of our archivist and if you don't have a member of your library staff on your accreditation team I would strongly recommend that you consult with them and what I did was spend a little bit of time with him showed him the system stressed to him that we wanted something really simple and then he showed us some different file naming conventions I think what we came up with probably violates standard naming conventions but it works great for us what we chose to go with was the office of origin and that we had standard abbreviation for them the title of the document as close to the title of the document as possible and then the date of the document that way I can find things easily when I want to link them also when I want to update things for our next round I know where I need to go to get the new version of the document and I know which version I have in my assurance argument we're working on a new strategic plan right now so I'll know that I'm going to need to trade that out and there are a number of nice features you can do you can replace a file so for example if you want to replace a file you can simply highlight the file you want to play replace if I have my new strategic plan ready I can simply go to it and I would hit open select the file and open but I'm just going to cancel out and it will replace it not only here but throughout your entire document for you you can also rename the file if you want to the other thing you can do if you click on the file you can view references and it will tell you where it is referenced in particular documents in particular particular sections and you can also delete a particular file it also has a nice feature that if you go to delete something that you are using that you have referenced in your assurance document the system will give you a little warning and say you're using this file in the assurance argument are you sure you want to go ahead and cancel something that you've linked if you want to you still can you can click OK or you can cancel out so those are the things you can kind of do I've also showed you you can view a file and it will open it in a separate window so this naming convention this cover sheet all preferences not something you have to do I showed you that you can look and see where a document is referenced it will tell you where in the document there's also another helpful feature that will show you whether or not you have any files that aren't referenced and right now all of the files are referenced when I add some files in a minute will show that that changes so as long as you have that green check mark you know that everything you've uploaded you are using and have linked to your assurance argument some of our pioneer cohort institutions ended up uploading all of them major documents and then dumping out which ones they didn't need we only uploaded the ones we needed we felt that with more efficient also this isn't a good way to think of the system as a data repository because once you hit lock any documents you have not referenced get deleted from the system they get permanently deleted so that's why it's critical to make sure you have this little green check box so that your files are referenced and you haven't gone to the work of uploading something think your reviewer is going to see it and they're not because it will be gone once you lock the system we've talked a little bit about the files themselves let's talk about creating the folders before we upload the files again you'll get a folder with the name of your institution and HLC documents folder and then you can create as many folders and subfolders as you would like and you don't have to create the subfolders that we did you can create whatever system works for you but I would strongly encourage taking time to think about how you want to organize your file we are closing around 200 files so to just upload them all in one folder would be a little overwhelming again we recruited the health of our library archivist we originally thought about having folders for each criterion and then subfolders to each core component and that seemed like it would work great but we quickly realized that there are several key documents that we reference in more than one section for example your strategic plan you'll go into reference in multiple criteria so it didn't work too well it wasn't nice and clean cut to just have a folder for each criterion but I know some of us here did find a way to make that work for them we chose to use a file folder system that paralleled the organizational structure of our institution so at Pittsburg State we have a division of campus life we found that not everything fit nicely into all campus structures so we also created a miscellaneous folder for external and internal documents we have the president with the area's active report directly to him we have the division of academic affairs and we have the division of advancement so we have these as our major sub folders and then within each of these divisions we looked at what are the units that report under these unit these areas so under academic affairs we have analysis planning and assessment we have college of Arts and Science College of Business and so on and you could go down to their department level if you want to we chose not to create subfolders for the departments but you can have as many layers as sub folders and it's helpful for you so think about what works at your institution and create a structure that is going to be meaningful to you this is just what works for us this is not an HLZ of a system requirement but I strongly encourage you to think about how you want to organize your files and spend some time developing folders once you know how we want to organize your folders you can simply create file folders very easily so let's say I want to create a new folder and I want to make it a sub folder under miscellaneous so simply click on wherever you want your folder to be and you'll get then some options that appear up here where you can either create a new folder you can rename or delete a folder I'm gonna go with a new folder and I'll just simply call it at their most folder and click Save and now it's shown up next time I come in this will get arranged in alphabetical order you can move your folders around you can rename you can delete them once I've got my folders I'm ready to upload files so simply click on the folder you want to put your file in so I'm going to put it in our demo folder over on the right-hand side there's an area to ask files click on the Browse button and then just go to whatever files you want to upload and you can do one file a more than one file at the same time I'm going to do a couple and notice that these have now appeared in my demo folder if I want to move them around again I can just take them and put them in a different folder if I want to so you can move things and get them in the right place and whatever you want to do notice my little green checkmark is gone and it now tells me I have unreferenced files which makes sense because I just uploaded two things and haven't done anything with them yet but you can view which files are not referenced and it can tell you which files aren't reference so you can then either go in and reference those files make sure you use them or you can select one or all of them to delete the files I'm just going to go ahead and cancel out so again that's a lot of information but once you get in there you'll see it's very straightforward and the only other feature I want to show you in this section before I stop for questions is there is a view activity button so you can click on this and see what has gone on so for example if I can't remember where I put that simple file - I can go into my activity log and say oh that's right I moved to under external that's where it is and so I know to access it and move it to a different place if I messed up putting it there let me now take us to the assurance argument which is our last section we need to take a look at and we need to look at how do we go ahead and make use of all evidence files and write a narrative now that we've uploaded our evidence files and you'll find that you'll work back and forth this is very an iterative process and debt you may do some work in the evidence file then you may do some work in the assurance of arguments and back and forth these little indications from the knot started to completed you can change them once you pick completed you can go back and put them to not start if you're in process so for example when we went out to the canvas what we would do is get feedback and then even if something had been checked as completed I would put things back to in process and all our accreditation leadership team would I'd make changes send it back to the accreditation leadership team for their input and then we get to complete it again so the order of this you don't have to do everything in the order I'm showing you real work back and forth through all of this and what we did was we had people just drop information into each of the core components they've been assigned to and then I went in and put everything into one voice I pulled it into a narrative we figured that given how short the document is we wanted it to just read smoothly you don't have to do that and some of the pioneer institutions have very separate teams working on each criterion but I chaired our efforts and put everything into one voice another thing we found helpful is that we had a technical writing faculty member on our accreditation leadership team and once I put everything into a narrative format he went through and just cleaned up my writing then we sent out to our internal leadership accreditation team members to give feedback that really cut down on wordsmithing time and we were able to focus very much on content but whenever whoever's going to add content is ready to add content they simply click on the core component they want to work on so I'm going to work on core component 1a this is been assigned to me I can see very clearly that I'm overdue so I'll click on this and then I can click edit or export print this is the same feature as you saw on the dashboard and allows you to to export a particular core component rather than the whole assurance argument so I'm going to click Edit and this is where I change from not started to improve this as I showed you earlier if you forget what it is you need to do there are instructions you can click on and it will remind you of the word limit and what you need to do in here but I'm going to close them so that it doesn't busy up the screen for us and it's out of the way here's where I add my text and link files if I click on my evidence source list right now I don't have any sources listed don't panic this doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong in the evidence file or you've lost all of your files what it means is that you have to tell the system which files you want to use for a call component that may seem a little cumbersome but again keep in mind you'll be uploading a lot of file and if for example in our case we had our 200 plus files just listed here for me to choose from that would take a lot of sorting through to find them so I'll need to tell the system which files I want to use for this particular component the URL sauceless given that that's much shorter you don't have to do anything with those once you put them in the evidence file they automatically show up for you in each component so I have to do two things I have to tell the system which files I want to use in this section and I have to add text and then I have to link them together and it doesn't matter which order you do them in and you'll probably work back and forth between the two but for the evidence file sources let me first show how we add the source so I'm going to talk this section is about our mission statement so I want to add something about the mission statement so this is where the work we did organizing files and naming files pays off because I know my mission statement is in the strategic plan strategic plan is out of the president's office so I can go to that division go to the president and there's my strategic plan and I can see at a glance this is what I need I mentioned earlier you can take your reviewer to the beginning of a document or to a specific page if I want to add a page I simply click on add page and I can put a page number in I know that our mission statement if I want to take our review is to directly to the page with a mission statement I need to put in page 7 I can have as many pages as I want and you can keep adding pages if you want to you don't have to add any pages if you just want to take your reviewer to the beginning of the document a question that often comes up is can you take a reviewer to a range of pages the answer is no but if you take your review of say to page 7 or page 15 is the landing page for opening that document they can continue to read through the document so they can scroll forwards and backwards through a document no matter what page you take them to you keep on adding sources so if I'm looking at mission I want to perhaps add my institutional effectiveness report because that talks about how our unit supports the mission and that's under academic affairs after the analysis planning and assessment office see how my work is paying off and I can see very clearly what this is so I can add that now it shows up I perhaps don't want to take the reviewers to a specific page here so I'll just leave it and now if I click on my evidence source the things I guided below show up the other thing I need to do with that text and I can either work in a Word document and copy things in and I can just do a simple ctrl C and B to copy and paste things in or you can and if you do that that tends to maintain most of the formatting unless you've got something really fancy that you did in your Word document it will maintain like the bold and italicize and so on it will maintain any number and we do but if you have different types and sizes of font that will get stripped out because the system defaults to specific font and size so you don't have to worry about what do you want to use Times New Roman or whatever else the system dictates that for you and any kind of things like that will be stripped out if you find you pasted something in and the formatting gets a little funky there is the option to paste as plain text so you might be better off just stripping out the formatting and pasting as plain text and then reformatting once you have put things in but quite honestly I found it was just much easier to work right within the system I didn't have to keep track of various versions it's all right there for me so the other thing you can do is just type about your mission statement directly into the text box and there are a number of features you can undo and redo my favorites you can bold italicize underline some basic alignment you can indent bullet number and check box sorry spellcheck you can add tables you would simply put your cursor wherever you want the table to be and then click on the table icon you get a little text box to enter some basic information and then you can click insert I'm just going to cancel out but if you do enter a table then you'll have some basic kinds of things you can do to the table that are ghosted out right now we chose not to include a table for a couple of reasons given how short subsections are we just felt the narrative flow better without tables embedded and we just linked to tables in evidence files the other thing is anything you put in this text box will count against your total word count so if you put a table in here any words in your table count against your word count whereas any evidence to link to the birds in your linked files do not count against your word count but if you find it work best for you to embed tables you certainly can do that option this is the only thing you can bed you cannot include any other figures or diagrams or photos or anything like that so once you've done the two things of adding text and adding your file sources you're ready to link your documents so if I want to there's two ways you can do it if I want to link my strategic plan to the mission statement I simply highlight the word or phrase I want to link to go to my evidence sauce list on my URL sauce list and then go to wherever I want so I want to take my reviewers directly to the page with the mission plan on it so I'll take them to a specific page perhaps I also want to take them to my course catalog I can link URL sources the same way or I can put my trust or wherever I want and then go to my evidence source list or URL source list select whatever piece of evidence I want and can link this way as well if I decide who I didn't really want to link something all I have to do is highlight it again and then there's a little unlink button up here click on the unlink and it's gone then you do want to go ahead and preview and this is how it will appear to your reviewer do click on your links to make sure that your documents have uploaded correctly and haven't bleep uploaded sideways or upside down when you scan them in and make sure it's the right document it's the right page so you can click on it yes this comes to on page with the mission like that notice this is page 6 I told it to go to page 7 I had to account for that cover page there and my institutional effectiveness report yeah this is showing up at the first page and reader can read through that so things that we can find I can close my preview remember it's safe they say we do not have that autosave feature you can also view activity so this is where you can see who did walk but you can also get back to an archived version so if somebody did something and you want to access an archived version you can't reinstate it but you can go back and see it and copy and paste from it into the current version and then when you're done you can check in or closed if you hit close it will remind you that you didn't check it in at that point you can ignore it and go back to your dashboard or you can check in if you realize you did mean to check it in not just close it and then go back to your dashboard at that point so I'm going to put up a final slide to show you how you contact the Commission to access the system so we can get it finished on time to gain access to the assurance system system coordinator should submit information listed on the screen to assurance admin at HL Commission org if this information has already been submitted to a Chelsea there is no need to resubmit approximately one week after sending the information the assurance coordinator will receive an email from a Chelsea with a link to login to the assurance system thank you for watching the assurance system webinar training you