Streamlining Assessment Exercises and Faculty Activity Reviews

A presentation given by Jonathan Breeze, Symplectic at the VIVO 2016 conference in Denver, CO.

Abstract:

Ask a researcher to populate an institutional webpage and you’ll see them roll their eyes and
move on to something more enjoyable.

Ask a researcher to complete their faculty activity report and they'll grudgingly do it, but
complain about the duplicated effort.

However: ask a researcher to keep a system up-to-date throughout the year, so that they can
avoid the annual form-filling common with other systems, and they might not only do it, but tell
their colleagues about how easy it was!

One of the core concepts behind Symplectic’s mission is the reduction of the administrative
burden from research institutions and their staff. The next logical step in this calling is the
tackling of faculty activity and performance-related assessments: parts of a much larger data-
gathering exercise that institutions partake in every year and one that remains laborious to all
required to contribute.

The latest major release of Elements, Symplectic’s leading Research Information Management
System, contained a highly-anticipated solution to this issue - the Assessment Module.
Assessment-related data can now be reused, repurposed, and resurfaced on a VIVO profile,
with researchers having the freedom to pick what’s pertinent for public use.

This presentation will explore how this module offers a significant new repurpose of
institutional data. Complementing our long-standing relationship with VIVO, Symplectic is
continually committed to semantically linking previously siloed data; knowing that this data is
only useful when it can be reused throughout an institution freeing faculty from burdensome
reentry.