In 2001, a small team of people at Virginia Commonwealth University started putting together a way to manage assessment data to support regional accreditation requirements.
Four people worked part-time on the project, with many other responsibilities in their busy jobs – sound familiar?
One day the two people with assessment backgrounds were trying to think of a name for a project that would focus on assessment in an institutional effectiveness context. They reviewed the well-known assessment cycle sequence and reflected on how it could create a shared view and understanding of what the desired outcomes were and of how well those outcomes were being achieved at VCU.
They envisioned a way of bringing together the right information to give busy administrators, faculty, and staff a picture of whether their best efforts were bringing forth the desired results. After all, the community shared a value of excellence.
That afternoon Jean Yerian started playing with creating an acronym for what she and Donna Jovanovich had discussed. She thought the assessment approach – this was before the software! – should integrate information, weaving it all together to create a tapestry of what assessment could do at VCU to give internal and external audiences an accurate picture of the levels of teaching, learning, service, and other important purposes of the institution. She began writing five descriptive sentences. Those sentences gave WEAVE its name, with the starting letters forming the acronym.
At first the two assessment people collected WEAVE information via a simple form that was downloaded from the web and returned as an email attachment. The volume of forms proved unmanageable, and soon the small team was back at work, this time developing an online assessment management system. The technical contributors were Kristine Downing, Donghai Huangfu, and Jim Yucha. WEAVE became WEAVEonline, released to the VCU community in March 2003.
After Virginia Commonwealth University was successful in its reaffirmation of accreditation, team members presented the approach at a number of state, regional, and national conferences. Several of those attending the presentations expressed interest in using WEAVEonline.
The small team worked with the VCU Tech Transfer office to see what would be possible. With the urging of a faculty member whose senior class took on investigating the market, VCU began licensing the software. A higher education source now offered a higher education solution for assessment management.
After three years, when WEAVEonline became too large to remain inside the university, James Farrelly entered the picture and formed Centrieva Corporation in May 2006 to exclusively market, license, and further develop WEAVEonline. As the familiar line goes, the rest is history.
We invite you to join us as this story continues to unfold. To learn more, please request a live demonstration.
