Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/139946
Keep Faculty Up-to-Date A business school's faculty do great things—teach, advise, research, write, manage, consult, present, volunteer—and keeping abreast of all of that activity is a challenge. "I spoke with administrators at one school who had to read in the newspaper that a member of their faculty won the Nobel Prize," says Matt Bartel, CEO of Digital Measures in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "It's important for schools to know what their faculty are doing, so that they can better market their programs or demonstrate that their faculty are staying current." With the right system and procedures in place, administrators can have their faculty's collective résumé at their fingertips, whether they want to use the information for accreditation, highlight their faculty's best work in front of stakeholders, or have a starting point for their strategic planning. However, for such a system to work well, it often requires faculty to input the data themselves. If a school is moving to a data management platform for the first time, faculty could be overwhelmed by the amount of data they'll need to enter into the system. Therefore, schools should plan how to ease faculty into the transition. For instance, schools could take an incremental approach, asking faculty to enter their historical information over a longer period of time. Or, it might make sense to hire staff or grad students to do the WANT TO LEARN MORE about specific SaaS platforms that track assessment and faculty data? Go to www. bizedmagazine.com/features/data-details for a printable table about nine popular software systems, including information about features, tech support, and pricing. 38 July/August 2013 BizEd initial data entry, and then provide incentives to encourage faculty to keep the information up-to-date. Says Jon Woodroof, co-founder of SEDONA Systems of Knoxville, Tennessee, "If schools base part of faculty's annual performance evaluations on the information they have entered and maintained in the system, they will keep the database up-to-date." No matter what approach administrators choose, it's important that they consider the full scope of their needs and adopt a system that can change with those needs, says Curt Naser, CEO of Axiom Education of Shelton, Connecticut, developer of the Mentor platform. "Cobbling different pieces of software together is bound to lead to frustration and limitations on use," he says. "Look for a system that is pedagogically responsible and that can meet a variety of needs." "Schools generally purchase software to solve a specific problem they face," says Bartel. "We often use the phrase, 'Enter data one time. Use it many times.'" With so many tools and approaches available, schools are sure to devise solutions that work well in their cultures—if they've done their homework. The ideas in this article and the table of companies available online (see box below, at left) are intended to be a starting point in that process. To read about the experiences of users of some of the software platforms mentioned in this article, as well as read answers to other questions related to assessment, explore the discussion forum dedicated to "Assessment" at the AACSB Exchange, theexchange.aacsb. edu/Discussions. Access requires institutional log-in information. ANTON IO ROSAR IO/G LOW I MAG ES platform might be a better option. That's especially true for schools satisfying accreditation standards related to the documentation of faculty qualifications and contributions. "A number of schools use an OOTB solution to manage their faculty contributions, but use something like Excel for assessment," she says. Ewell agrees that Excel is a powerful tool, but he sees one downside of its being a school's only data management tool—it offers no ability to create easyto-read customized reports with appealing graphics. That could be important to schools that want to show their accomplishments to accreditors and stakeholders. "To share reports with your dean or other stakeholders, you might want report templates with pre-programmed graphics capability so that you can show them well," says Ewell. "The payoff of the home-grown system is that you get exactly what you want. But creating such a system is a lot of work—I would exhaust the commercial possibilities first."