Your faculty are already busy doing what matters most:
teaching, scholarship, and service to the institution and community.
Understandably, furnishing information about their accomplishments and activities isn’t their top priority. Yet they frequently receive requests for this type of information — 8 to 12 times per year on most campuses. You ask each faculty member for everything from annual activity reports, promotion and tenure dossiers, profile updates for your university website, faculty qualifications information required by regional and program accreditors, and more. They have all of this information in their CV, but it’s trapped on their desktop in a Word document and it takes time to repackage and repurpose the content to give you what you need.
A good faculty reporting solution reduces this barrier to sharing their accomplishments. Activities are entered just once, and can then be used again and again to more completely and accurately fulfill your reporting needs — without any additional requests to faculty for the same information. And a great solution allows faculty to import information directly from their trusted CV, making it quick and easy for them to create a timely, accurate, and comprehensive foundation of activity data.
- Faculty activity reporting saves them time.
A good faculty activity reporting system doesn’t require faculty to re-enter things that are already captured in other systems, leveraging integrations with other campus systems to quickly and accurately populate information such as courses taught and grants received, and import citations from publication repositories. In addition, CV import functionality captures the full scope of faculty accomplishments while significantly reducing the time they spend on data entry.
- Faculty activity reporting gets you off their backs.
Currently, you ask each member of your faculty for information about their activities many times throughout the year. They’ll appreciate not having to constantly provide information that can be pulled directly from your faculty activity reporting system, and you can feel confident that the data is accurate and up-to-date.
- Faculty activity reporting gives them a functional repository.
Your faculty members don’t have a place to keep their faculty activity information that’s designed to meet both their needs and the needs of your institution. Their information is scattered in CVs, past reports, and multiple other places. A faculty activity reporting solution collects this information into one powerful tool that ensures all activities and accomplishments, including supporting artifacts (like grant award letters, full-texts of publications, and PowerPoint presentations) are available for answering the many information requests they and your institution receive.
- Faculty activity reporting helps them furnish information faster.
A faculty activity reporting system eliminates the tedious process of compiling the same information in different formats many times each year. The tool should be tailored to your institution’s requirements and offer custom reports that align with your specific reporting needs. Faculty can use an import-and-validate approach instead of manually copying and pasting the information. The right solution allows faculty to authentically represent their life’s work by pulling data directly from the system into customized CVs and other materials to support grant applications, conference proposals, and more.
- Faculty activity reporting helps them manage their milestones.
To succeed in their positions, faculty members must demonstrate their development by completing certain activities on certain timelines. With a faculty activity reporting solution, department chairs can better mentor faculty, and junior faculty will understand the full range of activities they should be completing. Chairs and faculty can benchmark progress against expectations and have a mutually understood starting point for faculty development conversations. Quality solutions can also facilitate faculty participation in annual review, reappointment, and promotion and tenure processes. A concurrent, tracked review process, guided by notifications, helps keep everyone aware of status and next steps.
- Faculty activity reporting raises their profiles.
Did you know that faculty web profiles rank among the three most-read sections of any university’s website? A faculty activity reporting solution can automatically populate web profiles so they’re always up to date, saving faculty time, and ensuring that current and prospective students, colleagues, alumni, business leaders, and the media can see their achievements. This results in more opportunity for faculty to collaborate and complete research. In addition, many grants require individuals with particular experience, and a faculty activity reporting solution can help you search for and find faculty members who are the right match.
Faculty activity reporting streamlines university processes and makes life easier for your faculty. Contact us today to find out why faculty members from top universities prefer to manage activity reporting with Watermark Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures).
