Client Showcase: Boston University on using Elements to streamlining Faculty Annual Reports

As part of our North American User Meeting last week, we were thrilled to hear from Steve Marois, Director of Faculty Actions, and Maura Monahan, Business Analyst, on Boston University’s process for streamlining the Faculty Annual Report using a hybrid assessment/ custom report method in Elements.

Boston University wanted to provide a win for faculty in what had already been a very stressful and challenging year, by simplifying the data collection and assessment process, and eliminating the need for face-to-face support during remote working. Our main goal was to improve the faculty experience by increasing the automation in the Assessment Module. This also brought additional downstream improvements:

  •  Less time registering reports for the upcoming FAR cycle, after technical improvements to the Assessment Module.
  • Less tech support required from IS&T project and service teams during the FAR cycle as support has transitioned to liaisons.
  • Less negative faculty feedback during the 2020 FAR cycle (a trend which will hopefully continue!).

Faculty feedback on the streamlined FAR process was that “Each year has been much smoother than the last with [Elements], and the faculty issues this year, college-wide, have been much less and most are easily resolved.”

Client Showcase: Boston University on using Elements to streamlining Faculty Annual Reports 1

With this partnership, we have the opportunity to position ourselves as
a world leader in the development of the scholarly ecosystem.

Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon

I cannot overstate how pleased we have been.
We have to have confidence to work with a partner
for at least 5 years on a project of this size.

Caleb Smith, Senior Strategy Manager for Research Intelligence & Analytics, University of Michigan

“Faculty need only spend perhaps less than an hour a year to prepare and submit their annual reports.”

Associate Dean, Carnegie Mellon University at Qatar

"Leveraging the interoperability between Symplectic Elements and DSpace has increased policy-driven institutional repository deposits by over 350%."

Ellen Phillips, Open Access Specialist, Boston University

Elements elegantly connected our multi-university system providing a
single source of truth throughout OIEx.

Tim Cain, The Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx)

The University measures the individual research activity of academic staff. This Measure of Research Activity (MoRA) requires the collection of publication data from faculty. Symplectic Elements supports this beautifully.

Floris van der Leest, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

[Elements] will help to bring transparency to the richness of thought showcased within non-traditional publications, providing a more holistic representation of faculties’ scholarly work.

Caleb Smith, University of Michigan

Feedback to date has been extremely positive from all levels across the University, with individual academics and colleagues actively promoting the ease of use of the system.

Rachel Baird, Research Policy Analyst, University of Liverpool