FLORIDA GULF COAST UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY

A decennial report, and a system held together by email

Incitti arrived at FGCU a little over three years ago — right in time to start writing the university’s SACSCOC decennial report for an institution she had no prior history with. FGCU’s submission process wasn’t even routed through its learning management system (LMS); it ran on a combination of SharePoint and email, and documents regularly ended up in the wrong person’s folder or inbox. A stretch of pandemic disruption and hurricane seasons hadn’t helped matters, either. Faculty hadn’t revisited FGCU’s state-mandated learning outcomes — then still called “academic learning compacts” — since 2012.

Building the foundation, one relationship at a time

FGCU brought on HelioCampus Assessment Management around the same time Incitti was drafting the decennial report, and rolled it out deliberately — a small, centralized assessment office didn’t have the bandwidth to move fast. The first use was practical: rebuilding the reporting workflow FGCU needed to satisfy SACSCOC, while Incitti wrote the self-study itself inside the platform. Annual and biennial reporting is now far more manageable, backed by evidence that used to live in scattered folders.

The real foundation, though, was relationships. Incitti met one-on-one with the program coordinators who own assessment on FGCU’s campus, learning what would actually make their work easier rather than layering new requirements on top of old ones. That listening tour surfaced a consistent pain point: departments wanted to run juried assessment but couldn’t get it off the ground, and gathering artifacts was the hardest part. Between direct and juried assessment inside HelioCampus, most of FGCU’s artifacts now live in its LMS instead of a departing faculty member’s hard drive.

From 25 samples to thousands

Joe Ross, Director of Undergraduate Studies and a 14-year member of the political science faculty, took on FGCU’s general education juried assessment pilot. FGCU’s Gen Ed program is built around five competencies — including critical thinking, human expression & society, and quantitative reasoning — that cross-disciplinary boundaries by design, giving faculty a sense that they’re assessing real program outcomes rather than checking a state-mandated box.

Ross used HelioCampus to change the math on sampling. His pilot juried assessment of critical thinking drew from more than 6,000 available artifacts across 14 courses in 17 disciplines, taught by 32 different faculty. He recruited 11 faculty evaluators from 11 different departments to score them, two reviewers per artifact — support he was able to fund with modest stipends. By the pilot’s second year, more than half of FGCU’s Gen Ed sections had at least one assignment linked for direct assessment, double the year before, and Ross had roughly 7,000 artifacts on hand to sample from for that year’s juried assessment cycle.

Faculty evaluators needed almost no ramp-up. Ross skipped a formal training session and sent an email with a few screenshots instead. In a post-pilot survey, evaluators rated the tool’s difficulty at an average of 0.75 out of 10 — five of eight respondents said zero.

Making the case for assessment over grading

One of Ross’s most persuasive moves was a simple side-by-side comparison. He showed faculty FGCU’s direct assessment results for critical thinking — which are effectively grades, clustered in the A and B range with little variation — next to the same students’ juried assessment scores, which showed far more differentiation. For faculty who weren’t previously part of assessment conversations, the contrast reliably produced what Ross calls a lightbulb moment: a student can earn full marks on an assignment for doing exactly what was asked, without yet showing the deeper skill development the university is actually trying to measure. That distinction — between what a grade certifies and what an outcome reveals — has become one of Ross’s most effective tools for building faculty buy-in, both for juried assessment specifically and for FGCU’s broader culture of assessment.

The pay-off

FGCU’s most recent SACSCOC decennial review came back with zero recommendations and full reaffirmation. Program coordinators who once had to be chased down for artifacts are now the ones asking for help, requesting the same juried assessment support Ross built for Gen Ed. In 2025, FGCU held its inaugural year of program-level assessment awards — Gold, Silver, and Bronze for Best Assessment Report, plus a Most Improved Program award to be added for 2026 — with the Faculty Senate backing a plan to attach real prize money the following year. And faculty are voluntarily coordinating across sections on shared assignments and instructional approaches, a level of cross-department collaboration that mostly wasn’t happening before Gen Ed had a common evidence base.

What's next

FGCU is now working to connect its general education program to the majors it feeds into — building documentation, in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences, that shows students how a Gen Ed course maps to the work they’ll do later in their program, with an eye toward linking it to FGCU’s digital badging system. The Academic Roadmaps are being launched by Spring 2027 as marketing material for non-declared majors. Gen Ed Palooza is moving up to September to align with the university’s assessment cycle, and Ross is leading faculty working groups through a deep dive into the results for human expression & society and quantitative reasoning, while preparing faculty teaching in scientific inquiry and writing & communication — the two competencies up for review next spring.

It’s a long way from 25 hand-gathered artifacts and a submission process held together by SharePoint and email. But ask Incitti what’s changed most, and she won’t point to the artifact count first — it’s that faculty who once dreaded an email from the assessment office now ask when the next Gen Ed Palooza is.