Collaboratory Data on Community Engagement & Public Service in Higher Education

Collaboratory is a software product developed and maintained by HandsOn Connect Cloud Solutions. It is intended to help higher education institutions accurately and comprehensively track their relationships with the community through engagement and service activities. Institutions that use Collaboratory are given the option to opt-in to a data sharing initiative at the time of onboarding, which grants us permission to de-identify their data and make it publicly available for research purposes. HandsOn Connect is committed to making Collaboratory data accessible to scholars for research, toward the goal of advancing the field of community engagement and social impact.<br>Collaboratory is not a survey, but is instead a dynamic software tool designed to facilitate comprehensive, longitudinal data collection on community engagement and public service activities conducted by faculty, staff, and students in higher education. We provide a standard questionnaire that was developed by Collaboratory’s co-founders (Janke, Medlin, and Holland) in the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement at UNC Greensboro, which continues to be closely monitored and adapted by staff at HandsOn Connect and academic colleagues. It includes descriptive characteristics (what, where, when, with whom, to what end) of activities and invites participants to periodically update their information in accordance with activity progress over time. Examples of individual questions include the focus areas addressed, populations served, on- and off-campus collaborators, connections to teaching and research, and location information, among others.<br><br>The Collaboratory dataset contains data from 45 institutions beginning in March 2016 and continues to grow as more institutions adopt Collaboratory and continue to expand its use. The data represent over 6,200 published activities (and additional associated content) across our user base.<br>Please cite this data as:<br>Medlin, Kristin and Singh, Manmeet. Dataset on Higher Education Community Engagement and Public Service Activities, 2016-2023. Collaboratory [producer], 2021. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-07-07. https://doi.org/10.3886/E136322V1<br><br>When you cite this data, please also include: <br>Janke, E., Medlin, K., &amp; Holland, B. (2021, November 9). To What End? Ten Years of Collaboratory. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/a27nb<br>