Between their teaching, service, and research efforts coupled with evaluations for tenure and review, faculty have a lot on their plate—and a lot to prove. It can be tough to capture and showcase the data to fully demonstrate faculty impact, and that burden often falls on faculty themselves. The University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNT HSC) found a way to harness that data with Interfolio in order to illuminate faculty excellence, streamline RPT processes, and showcase strategic plan achievements.
Connecting the Faculty Data Dots
With six schools specializing in patient-centered education, research, and health care, UNT HSC had a need for a centralized faculty activity reporting system that could provide a clear picture of the institution’s 300 faculty members. “We had data coming from all different places, and it was kind of up to the departments and chairs to collect the data for things like annual review or for the faculty member when came to promotion and tenure,” shared Nancy Staples, Academic & Business Manager in the Office of the Provost at UNT HSC. She also noted that the institution was working with a homegrown system for reviews that was difficult to work with, and files for promotion and tenure were being mailed on flash drives.
“We had internal tracking on spreadsheets, and PeopleSoft has their rank and service time, but it didn’t have a full picture of any faculty members. It was very spread out,” said Staples. The institution sought a solution that could provide this complete snapshot of its faculty members in one location and made the decision to implement Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR) and Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure (RPT) to help streamline faculty processes.
Saving Faculty and Administrators Time
UNT HSC collects and activates data in FAR, which is used in tandem with the Interfolio Data Service. Using APIs, basic HR data is brought into the system from PeopleSoft, teaching data comes in from the registrar’s office, and additional feeds come in from the grants office. “With the Data Service, it pulls in more scholarly activity,” said Staples. These activities are already appropriately formatted, creating a much easier process for the institution’s faculty to simply click and accept to add activities to their profile. “Before, they had to go in and format it—it was a lot of tedious work,” she added.
Maintaining accurate faculty data in a centralized location is also beneficial for reviews, as the vita is pulled directly from FAR into RPT. “Before the faculty member submits their case, they go in and review it to make sure that their activity reporting is correct,” noted Staples, “so what they put into their annual review is their truth.” In addition, the institution has templates for the promotion and tenure cases accessible through Interfolio’s Dossier. “Even five years out from a promotion, they can go and start building the case in Dossier,” said Staples. “And then when they are ready to go up, we just create their case, and they slide the information over from Dossier directly into their P&T case. I’ve seen a P&T case created and submitted within four days—they have all the information right there already set up.”
Showcasing Faculty Impact With Web Profiles
When it comes to showcasing faculty accomplishments, UNT HSC sets the bar high. “We have public-facing profiles that are fed from Faculty Activity Reporting,” noted Staples. “It’s an automatic feed—every night, it uploads to the profile, and they can go in at any time and look at it.” These profiles include a faculty member’s accomplishments, research, and academic details. As updates are made in FAR, these changes are reflected on their web profiles. “We allow it to be as much or as little as they want to publish.”
Interfolio Faculty Web Profiles is a new addition to our leading Faculty Information System, allowing academic leaders to activate existing data to benefit both their scholars and their institution. Integrating with FAR and the Interfolio Data Service, our web profiles solution is the easiest way to highlight the holistic impact of your scholars across their service, teaching, and research accomplishments. Automatically search, ingest, and deduplicate 280 million records and conference proceedings published in over 60,000 sources to create faculty profiles quickly and seamlessly. Faculty regain valuable working hours, enabling them to spend time on higher-impact activities.
Watch the on-demand webinar to hear more about how UNT HSC activates data to illuminate faculty impact. If you’d like to find out how Interfolio Web Profiles can help increase the public visibility of your scholars, contact us today for a demo.