It Takes a Village: How Stockton University Turned a Stalled Rollout Into Institution-Wide Assessment Adoption

Choosing a Platform: A Deliberate, Cross-Functional Process

In fall 2022, Stockton's then-associate provost asked Walton to research and select an assessment management platform for the university. Walton knew immediately this couldn't be a solo effort, so she built a work group representing the people who would ultimately use, support, and rely on the system: the chief information officer, the IT director, two of Stockton's seven deans, two program chairs (one from education, one from nursing) and two accreditation managers, one from health sciences and one from business.

From the outset, the group prioritized integration with Stockton's learning management system (LMS) to enable scalable, assignment-level data collection, along with a platform flexible enough to support the complex needs of accredited programs without overwhelming programs that weren't accredited. Ease of use, strong reporting, and a vendor that could provide reliable training and support rounded out the criteria.

The work group spent nearly a year researching options, asking hard questions, and sitting through demos before selecting and signing with HelioCampus in May 2023.

The Challenge: An Ambitious Plan Meets an Uneven Starting Line

Walton and Soos built a six-month plan to take all 78 Stockton programs live: introduce the platform to chairs and coordinators, train faculty on linking assignments to outcomes, build an annual report template, and collect the first round of reports, all between January and June 2024.

The plan assumed programs were starting from roughly the same place. They weren't. Some programs had well-defined outcomes and regular assessment cycles already in place. Others had outcomes that were outdated, overly broad, or didn't exist at all, and roughly half of Stockton's programs had no curriculum map whatsoever. In many programs, assessment had functioned as a compliance exercise disconnected from teaching and curriculum decisions, which meant faculty needed to be convinced the work was worth doing before they could be trained on how to do it.

The Turnaround: Building a Village, Not a Broadcast

Walton and Soos paused the original timeline and rebuilt their approach around a simple realization: readiness varied by program in skill, confidence, culture, and capacity, and training had to vary with it. Broad Zoom sessions gave way to one-on-one meetings with chairs, attendance at individual program meetings, drop-in hours, and short, self-serve “micro-trainings” — infographics and screen-recorded walkthroughs — that let faculty engage on their own schedule.

To scale that personalized support without adding headcount, Stockton asked each of its seven schools to name one or two “platform specialists,” point people who learned the platform alongside Walton and Soos and became the first line of support within their own school. Schools chose specialists that fit how they already worked: the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences assigned two administrative staff, while the School of Business assigned two faculty members. 

The model mattered because it put support closest to where questions actually came from. A faculty member in biology hearing from a specialist embedded in their own school, rather than a central assessment office speaking a different disciplinary language, built trust faster and reduced resistance. It also freed Walton and Soos to give individualized attention to the programs that needed to build outcomes and curriculum maps from scratch.

By fall 2024, stability had also returned to the provost's office, restoring executive sponsorship for the work. Together with the platform-specialist model, that support let Stockton reset expectations, normalize a longer learning curve, and treat setbacks as part of the process rather than as failure.

The Results: A Shared Foundation, Institution-Wide

As of spring 2026, every one of Stockton's 78 programs has documented program learning outcomes and a curriculum map in HelioCampus, up from roughly half of programs having any curriculum map at all when the initiative began. Program-level engagement with assignment linking has grown sharply in the past two semesters as well:

Time Returned to a One-and-a-Half-Person Office

Before HelioCampus, Walton spent four to six weeks every summer managing Stockton's annual reporting process for academic programs, minors, and academic units. Each of the roughly 94 reports had to be reviewed individually to ensure all required sections were complete, provide feedback where needed, route reports to deans for review, and then archive the final versions.

That reclaimed time has gone directly into work Walton says she otherwise would not have had the capacity to support, including serving on Stockton's General Education redesign and implementation task force.