Although it has been 5 years since the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) expressed the expectation that schools should be demonstrating a high level of maturity implementing their assurance of learning programs, the authors' results indicate that most accredited programs are in the early stages of developing their closing-the-loop practices. Among assurance of learning leaders there is disagreement as to what constitutes a closingthe-loop activity and there are serious challenges to systematically implementing curricular responses including the time necessary to develop, initiate, and then reevaluate effectiveness. Faculty ownership, a crucial feature of the assurance of learning process, is reported as the number one challenge confronting accredited programs.
The importance, and associated challenges, of faculty ownership and engagement in the Assurance of Learning (AoL) process are well documented in the literature. This paper demonstrates how schools can further their AoL objectives by encouraging and subsequently supporting organic, faculty led initiatives. Specifically, we present a case study of a faculty led initiative to explore and demonstrate, as a proof of concept, how Lean Six-Sigma (LSS) can be used to improve AoL practices.
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