Access to faculty data is a vital priority for any institution of higher education. You never know when you’ll need to answer a specific inquiry about faculty activities when fielding questions from media personnel, grant sponsors, donors, prospective students, or others. It can be a time-consuming and error-filled process to find faculty data when required, which is why it’s necessary to invest in a dedicated faculty data solution.
Watermark Faculty Success solution (formerly Digital Measures) offers a central data source for simplifying and organizing all faculty-related data, including research activity, tenure status, and other accomplishments. Streamlined access to this data will inform your annual faculty reviews and allow you to keep your published information current. Learn more about faculty data and why ensuring its relevance is so important.
Current problems with data management
When it comes to faculty data sourcing, the status quo creates a few major pain points. Recognizing and addressing those issues can help you create a more efficient and useful process for accessing and utilizing faculty data.
Data is often scattered across multiple sources within and beyond an institution. Pieces of information about faculty publications, awards, and other achievements might be located across various websites, CVs, and other sources. Collecting, organizing, and presenting data in this fashion incur all kinds of issues. Most universities patch together data from various internal and external locations. It’s a time-consuming and often inefficient process. Some concerns with common practices include:
It’s a resource-heavy process: Consistently pulling data from external sources can quickly grow expensive and time-consuming, which is why most institutions rarely do it.
Formatting is inconsistent: When you have to gather data from multiple sources, formats are going to vary. Ensuring a standardized format is vital for clear understanding, but it can present a logistical hurdle.
Accuracy is not certain: The current practices for faculty data organization lend themselves to accuracy issues. For instance, it can be challenging to assign the right activities to the right faculty members, especially if two have similar names. Manual data collection and entry are bound to lead to accuracy errors. These errors can cause issues down the road. If someone needs to verify faculty information, they might come across conflicting data.
Timeliness is challenging: Performing this complex process is not something institutions do every day — many only do so annually. For that reason, faculty information is often out of date when it’s needed. Outdated information can be a significant concern when addressing inquiries or writing grant applications.
As you can see, a better process for faculty data updating is necessary. Using dedicated tools will help you streamline and simplify your faculty data.
Why having reliable faculty information is important
Institution leaders should understand the significance of keeping faculty information updated. It’s an essential priority for any university. Here are a few reasons why reliable faculty data is always crucial:
Data guides decisions: One of the most important things about data is that it informs decisions, allowing university administrators to make precise judgments for the betterment of their institution.
Data helps secure financial resources: You’ll need access to faculty data for grant applications and donor transparency. Reliable faculty information enables you to secure financial resources by providing honesty and organization.
Data creates a better user experience: Well-organized, updated data is necessary for your website. Users should always have access to this information. Many different individuals search for faculty information — such as potential students, parents of students, journalists, and stakeholders. Each of these users should have access to accurate faculty data.
Data enables the celebration of faculty accomplishments: Data holds importance beyond its practical implications — it also gives you the tools to celebrate faculty accomplishments in a timely manner. Your highest-achieving faculty members will feel recognized and appreciated. As an added benefit, prospective students, donors, and others will be aware of your faculty’s achievements. Students can use this information to compare your faculty and institutions to competitors. If students see that your faculty members continue contributing to their fields as educators and make strides in new developments, they may deem your institution as being a better fit for their academic journeys and future careers.
Data measures an institution’s total impact: Accurate, up-to-date data gives an institution the tools to measure its total impact — and represent it to the world. Combined faculty achievements showcase your university’s effect on academia.
Data highlights institutions as supportive: Leveraging data and sharing your findings with faculty members, stakeholders, decision-makers, and your community can highlight your institution as one that supports continuous improvement. Collecting, analyzing, and sharing data showcases your efforts to identify pain points and address them efficiently. Students, faculty members, and anyone else in your community can recognize your commitment to growth and data transparency.
Tips for keeping faculty data up-to-date
Keeping accurate and reliable data can help departments and sectors across your institutions. Here’s how you can ensure your data remains up-to-date:
Leverage data for automation: Embracing technology is one of the best ways to access reliable data consistently. You can use online tools for various tasks and data tracking. For example, scheduling tools can track one-on-one meetings between instructors and students, department heads, and other essential meetups. Tracking these meetings can highlight the effort your team puts into completing tasks and create a foundation for enhanced communication and future collaborative projects. You can also use tools to record meetings and other sessions, allowing your team to revisit them when necessary rather than engaging in back-and-forth email chains.
Encourage planning for regular updates: Maximizing efficiency is critical for many processes, including collecting and updating data. Encourage your team to schedule time for regular updates on their profile or through reporting faculty activities. If your faculty dedicates timeframes for these tasks, they may be more likely to update information more often, ensuring you can access the most recent data when necessary without adding stress or mounds of work to existing faculty workloads.
Communicate the importance of reliable data to faculty: Anytime you want to make a change at your institution, you must communicate the importance of it with your faculty, stakeholders, and decision-makers. By explaining your initiatives and steps to get there, you can ensure everyone is on the same page and takes the necessary steps to achieve your goal. Additionally, by expressing the importance of reliable data and your expectations for which information to collect and how to record it, you can define collection processes to ensure each faculty member records and has access to the same type of information.
Reward faculty for updating information: Although many faculty members may see the benefit of updating and collecting data often, others may need an incentive. Rewarding team members for their efforts can prompt them to complete these tasks more frequently and with a more watchful eye while showing your appreciation. Whether you offer additional time off, one-time bonuses, or another type of monetary compensation, these small incentives can make a significant impact on faculty member motivation and commitment, bringing your team closer to your vision and goals.
How Watermark can help you stay on top of data
To keep your faculty data accurate and current, it’s essential to use a faculty activity insights tool. Our Faculty Success tool keeps your information front and center, allowing you to update faculty data year-round. You’ll find the system can help you accomplish all of the following:
Simplify data entry: One key benefit of the Faculty Success tool is that it helps faculty keep their profiles up to date. To refresh their information, all faculty members need to do is upload their latest CVs. It’s a much quicker and easier process than manual data entry. They can update or review their data at any time and within moments. The streamlined process can save your institution hours of time so faculty can focus on meaningful tasks rather than painstaking data entry.
Inform faculty reviews: Our system also features intuitive drag-and-drop tools to mirror your established review policies. These features make it easy to access articles, accomplishments, and previous reviews for accurate faculty evaluation. The Faculty Success tool connects directly with the Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys tool, which helps build a stronger understanding of faculty performance. In that way, it informs faculty reviews and major decisions.
Receive automatic updates: You’ll also enjoy automatically populated web profiles based on faculty-uploaded CVs. You can share and celebrate faculty accomplishments while saving time and resources. Keeping your faculty information updated online helps you put your best foot forward, which may help you earn financial resources or entice prospective students.
Complement the Watermark product suite: We’ve designed our Faculty Success tool to accompany our product suite. With combined programs, you can have a streamlined and effective process.
Along with the mirage of benefits above, Faculty Success provides process consistency and compliance insurance. Governing boards and accreditors expect these elements, and they are essential for institutional integrity. While some other solutions offer only default reports, Faculty Success is configurable, empowering you to access base, standard, and out-of-the-box reports that reflect your institution’s needs based on your research. With the power of this comprehensive and customizable solution, you can capture, share, and analyze meaningful data easily.
Stay up-to-date with faculty data with Watermark
Access to timely, accurate faculty activity reporting data is a major priority for any institution. Reliable faculty data helps you make decisions, perform useful faculty reviews, keep stakeholders informed, and celebrate your faculty’s accomplishments. Data is a powerful resource in countless ways. For that reason, ensuring your information is always current and accessible is vital.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your faculty data organization, consider using our Faculty Success program. Our tool combats the pain points of status quo data collection by making the process easy, integrating with other solutions, and producing automatic website content. Maximize the impact of your faculty information and see our solution in action — request a demo today.
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