faculty reporting systems: expectations vs. realities (166241964)

7/29/2019 Faculty Reporting Systems: Expectations vs. Realities (166241964)

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Faculty Reporting Systems:Expectations vs. Realities

Josh Ebert, Lead Documentation SpecialistDavid Stack, Deputy CIO



What is a Faculty Reporting System?

• Faculty Reporting Systems are used to collect metricsand descriptions of a person’s academic endeavors for

a number of administrative purposes.

• Typical measures include the number of courses or

students taught, descriptions and amounts of awarded

grants, and information about scholarly publications.

• Can be homegrown or purchased commercially,

depending on needs and complexity.



Why use a Faculty Reporting System?

• To serve as an efficient electronic replacement for theannual “brag sheet” used to evaluate faculty performance

for annual merit raise exercises.

• To eliminate the need for administrative “status updates”

to compile assessment- and funding-related reports.

• To use previously-vetted information from other campus

sources (i.e., grant amounts or courses taught) that can

reduce errors and simplify data entry.



QDoes your institution currently have a

Faculty Reporting System?

»Vendor?

»In-house?

Are you planning to implement one?



Progress at UWM: Our Goals

• Generate faculty annual summaries

• Prepare for institutional accreditation

• Integrate with campus data sources

• Leverage this data with new tools

• Share public data with partner institutions



Progress at UWM: Our Implementation

• University purchased a product calledActivity Insight for campuswide use

• Individual units encouraged (but not required) to use it

• No campuswide governance or promotional strategy;no strategy for coordinating area-specific reporting needs

with the overall needs of the institution

• Individual units have started to develop tools for

importing and exporting data



QHow is data entered into your reporting

system?

» Manually?» Automated feeds?

» Web scraping?

»

Other?



UWM

Digital

Measures

“Activity

Insight”Database

Automated

Identification and

Upload of Publication

Information

UWM, MU, MSOE,

MCW

Faculty Collaboration

Database

Automatic Lists on Faculty

Web Pages

Automatic Recommendations

of Collaborators

Manual Input of

Publication

Information

Proposed Flow of Publication Information



UWM

Digital

Measures

“Activity

Insight”Database

UWM, MU, MSOE,

MCW


Database

Regional/International Collaboration



UWM

Digital

Measures

“Activity

Insight”

Database

UWM, MU, MSOE,

MCW


Database

Clinical & TranslationalScience Institute of

Southeast Wisconsin

“Institutions will

participate in the

network by installing

VIVO, or by providing

semantic web-compliant data to the

network.”

Regional/International Collaboration



QAre you using a Faculty Reporting System

to feed any other systems, e.g., identifying

research collaborators?



Progress at UWM: Current Challenges

•

Uneven adoption across Schools and Colleges

• Area-specific customizations make standardized

campus-wide data input and reporting problematic

• Different ways of measuring and reporting “scholarship”across disparate academic units

• Mistrust and lack of incentives for faculty adoption



Progress at UWM: Current ChallengesBalancing Area & Institutional Needs

• Different terminology in different academic areas

• What types of scholarly activities are valued in

different disciplines?

• Large number of possible activities; people don’twant to see prompts for “irrelevant” activities

• Desired functionality of campuswide reporting vs.

freedom of individual units in designing andcoordinating their own reporting devices



QDo you have a uniform solution across

campus, or something that is tailored to

different academic areas?



Progress at UWM: Current ChallengesGaining Faculty Buy-In

• Front-loaded assent without formal governance model

• Balancing initial faculty expectations of usage with a

desired expansion of functionality

• What new uses for data were proposed or developedafter the collection process had begun?

• When is it necessary to go back and seek approval from

faculty members about new uses for their data?



QHow have you gained faculty buy-in for

using a Faculty Reporting System?



How Are We Meeting These Challenges?

•

Reaching out to area stakeholders to form acampuswide governance group

• Usability testing of user documentation and entry

screens to improve ease of entry

• Continuing to seek out existing campus data repositories

to minimize irksome duplicate data entry

• Publicizing development and outreach efforts to

demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement



How Are We Meeting These Challenges?Value-Added Development

• Two priorities:1. Making the process of data entry easier

2. Making better use of data within the system

• Building the capacity to “scrape” publication records from

citation databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, etc.) and

import them without manual entry

• Giving faculty the ability to use entered data to populate

profile webpages and locate potential campus and arearesearch collaborators with common interests



Best Practices and Recommendations

•

Develop a model of shared governance to ensureconsistent adoption and collaborative involvement

• Define a core set of activities that will be used for

campuswide reporting and minimize the amount of

“custom” categories used by individual areas

• Develop a common vocabulary and shared expectations

for activity entry and uses of system data

• Demonstrate commitment to the tool with a top-down

promotional and outreach effort



Josh Ebert, Lead Documentation Specialist

[email protected]

David Stack, Deputy CIO

[email protected]

Questions?

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