Being able to engage and test our product with researchers and administrators makes up a big part of our development effort. Using this feedback has helped us improve Elements over the years and informs nearly every release. Our most recent example of this form of collaboration is the addition of a new module, Teaching Activities.
Capture courses, supervisions and examinations
Recently, feedback we received from clients was that their researchers spend a large part of their time teaching courses, supervising students and correcting examinations but there wasn’t anywhere to store this information in Elements. Capturing this data was especially important to our US clients, as a large part of their faculty assessment is based on their teaching activities. The new module allows researchers to create, capture and display teaching activities alongside their research outputs. Like our other modules, all data captured in Teaching Activities is accessible via Elements’ in-built reporting functionality, the (stellar) API and in the Reporting Tools database. This means clients can create customised reports with the data and save themselves significant administrative effort!
The CASRAI standard
CASRAI, is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to creating standardised practices for the sharing of research information. As a development partner and supporter of CASRAI, we adopted field types in Teaching Activities from their dictionary standards. This is just one of the many steps we are taking to adopt CASRAI standards in Elements. The benefit here is that it allows clients who are importing data from legacy systems to easily populate the new module without having to define their own field types.
Want to know more?
If you are already an Elements customer, you can read our release notes to learn more about how our product has moved on from a publication management system to a central hub for research information at an institution. Otherwise just get in touch!