While finances and enrollment changes have become mainstays of institutional concern, student learning assessment remains a top-cited area of concern and need for improvement for higher education institutions across accreditors. When assessment is cited, student affairs and co-curricular assessment activity (or lack thereof) is one of the top areas lacking among institutional practices.
An evergreen challenge is the lack of resources and knowledge around student affairs assessment. For these reasons and more, Student Affairs Assessment Leaders (SAAL) continue to invest in and promote their free massive open online course (MOOC), Applying & Leading Assessment in Student Affairs.
The course has run annually for the past nine years and consistently sees quality ratings of over 90%. Indication materials and activities have also had a positive impact on these ratings. It averages more than 1,600 participants per year and consistently brings in more folks due to the relevance of the material paired with the lack of resources and guidance available at institutions for faculty, staff and administrators on the subject. A free, self-paced introductory course with an abundance of resources and practical activities to ground the material has proven successful, popular and useful to thousands of people.
Each year, Joe Levy—who serves as the Open Course Manager for the SAAL Board of Directors—conducts analysis based on course participant results and feedback on the course experience. This serves as a great recap of the course experience for the year, and shows implications for changes that will influence the next iteration of the course.
This blog provides a summary of the data analysis and results from the 2025 open course that ran from February to March of 2025. The reporting resulted in a total of 88 pages, opening with an executive summary of six pages, followed by reports for the Welcome Survey/User Profile, Quiz Results, Assignment Rubric Results and User Experience/End of Course Survey Results. The executive summary PDF has bookmarks for these respective reports and summarized data disaggregation elements.
Key Takeaways: Enrollment
This year, we saw 1,677 participants enroll in the course, with 268 of them successfully completing the course. This resulted in a 16% completion rate, which is slightly lower than the 17.9% completion rate from 2024 but higher than the 14% and 15% completion rates from 2023 and 2022, respectively. 2025 holds the fifth highest completion rate in nine years of running the course. In addition to the competitive completion rate, this was our fourth highest enrollment in the history of the course!
Welcome Survey/User Profile
Participants are largely hearing about the course from friends of colleagues, SAAL/sponsors or instructors. They take the course because they enjoy learning about topics that interest them and hope to gain skills for a promotion or new career. While they have online experience from school or through various MOOC providers, course takers are relatively split between passive and active participants, who largely anticipate spending one to two hours per week on the course.
The majority of course takers spend 40% or less of their jobs on assessment and identify as intermediate or beginner with respect to their assessment competency. They hold all sorts of roles at institutions, with large concentrations of staff, managers/directors, administrators and student affairs assessment professionals. They work in functional areas across the institution, with the largest concentrations in student engagement and involvement, institutional effectiveness, and student conduct and care. They attend from all types of institutions, but the largest concentrations are in Public four-year over 10,000, Public four-year under 10,000 and Private four-year under 10,000. While we have course takers from all over the world, the vast majority are from North America, nearly half live in suburban residential communities, and most are native English speakers.
Course participants typically have master's degrees, while the next largest group has terminal degrees. The course welcomed participants of all ages (from 16 to 70), with an average reported age of 42 for all respondents and completers, and the most frequently reported ages being 40 for all respondents and 32 for completers. Course participants are majority female and the majority identify as women. While many races and ethnicities are represented, most participants identify as white, followed by Southeast Asian and East Asian.
Cecause course completers had a very similar demographic distribution/profile as the initial sample of survey respondents, the above narrative profile holds true for them, too. These results also largely mirror the results from last year, but you can read the Welcome Survey Results 2025 report to see more details and comparison information.
