Faculty Success Helps West Virginia University Ace Higher Learning Commission Review

The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) had recently increased scrutiny of faculty credentialing, so West Virginia University needed to produce vitae and faculty transcripts for accreditation. But these proof-of-credentials were not on file at the university, despite institutional and departmental policies that required departments to store this information.

“We found out that we didn’t have vitae on file and didn’t have transcripts for nearly 80% of our faculty,” Louis Slimak, Assistant Provost of Curriculum & Assessment, said. “And we had no clean way of gathering that or any other information. We had an entirely manual, pencil-and-paper process. Faculty had cartons of paper that went to their department chair. Then, after reviewing the contents of the boxes, they had to carry it up to the provost for review.”

WVU switched from a paper-based system to Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) to handle faculty activity data. They use it for promotions and tenure so they can collect the faculty’s college and departmental service accomplishments, while also capturing recognized professional service outside the institution. “We capture public service within the community, throughout the state, and nationally,” said Slimak. “We then use that in institutional reports like accreditation.”

For WVU, Faculty Success goes well beyond promotion and tenure. The data is helpful for faculty assessment, teaching and learning centers, and other areas of campus. “I link it to student success metrics,” Slimak said. “We compare midterm grades and final grades per course. We can then capture faculty syllabi and look at teaching progress. We have also pulled those syllabi into our library repositories and made them available for new faculty, adjunct faculty, and students.”

WVU gave faculty a year to gather their transcripts from the past five years, then uploaded the transcripts into Faculty Success and asked the faculty to link them to the courses they taught. When the HLC asked to see the records of more than 80 faculty members, the university was easily able to pull the requested data.

“What Faculty Success does fantastically is put all faculty records in one place, let everyone at each different level review it and streamline the entire workflow,” Slimak said.

The report for HLC accreditation listed the courses each faculty member had taught over the last five years and faculty transcripts and the vitae. “It was so clean the HLC asked us to present the system at their next conference,” Slimak said.