CEA Global Education Appoints New Director of Assessment, Brings 25 Years Experience

Tempe, Ariz. (March 6, 2012) – CEA Global Education is pleased to announce that Scott G. Blair, PhD, current Academic Dean of France at CEA Global Campus, has been appointed to the position of Director of Assessment for CEA’s Global Campus operations. The creation of this new post signals CEA’s commitment of ensuring high quality student learning and developmental outcomes throughout CEA’s Global Campus programs.

 

Blair will have strategic responsibility for reviewing and evaluating CEA’s current learning assessment processes at Global Campus centers. He also, in conjunction with CEA’s academic leadership and faculty corps around the world, will lead CEA’s efforts in designing, implementing and evaluating new assessment tools and processes to provide improved qualitative and quantitative data on student learning and development in CEA’s many study abroad locations. Blair’s new role is part of a company-wide initiative to align CEA's learning outcomes assessment processes with both Forum Standards of Good Practice in Education Abroad and the needs of U.S. Higher Education in today's accountability-based educational environment. By improving the way assessment data informs CEA’s program design and review, this initiative will strengthen CEA’s tradition of providing students with meaningful and transformative learning experiences abroad.

 

With 25 years of experience as university instructor and administrator—having held teaching positions with many French and American University and study abroad programs in Paris since the 1980s — Blair brings considerable classroom and instructional assessment experience to this new position. In his role since 2006 as Academic Dean at the CEA Global Campus in Paris, Blair was instrumental in designing core academic infrastructure and policy for CEA’s Global Campuses within its School or Record partnership with the University of New Haven. He has also introduced external assessment tools into CEA processes with CEA’s ongoing use at Global Campus sites of the Global Perspective Inventory.

 

“This new position reflects CEA’s determination to create total learning environments abroad that CEA can continuously improve upon based upon the enhanced assessment data CEA will be able to generate, analyze, and feed back into programming,” said Brian J. Boubek, Chairman and CEO of CEA Global Education.

 

Blair holds his doctorate in History from the Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), an MA in European History from Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.), and a BA in English from Miami University of Oxford in Ohio. He led design work for CEA’s five-stage assessment processes for CEA faculty and courses. He has recently completed training through the Experiential Education Academy of the National Society for Experiential Education, where he also chairs the SIG (Special Interest Group) on Assessment, Evaluation & Research. He also contributes to NAFSA’s Knowledge Community on Teaching, Learning & study abroad Scholarship. Some of Blair’s work in curricular design and assessment has appeared recently in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad and he speaks frequently on study abroad and assessment issues at professional conference such as The Forum, EAIE, NAFSA, NSEE and APUAF in France.