Elements alongside a CV and narrative for annual evaluation

This is the prototype case study. It is drawn from Working Group notes on one institutional interview about Elements. It documents a local practice. It is not a software review and not a claim about every campus that uses Elements.

• Primarily annual faculty evaluation
• Tracking grants

Faculty enter activity information in Elements. Evaluation also uses an updated CV and a faculty narrative. Faculty may spend approximately a day entering information.

Faculty may not know how chairs and review committees use the data. The interviewee was not aware of Elements being used as part of the final tenure and promotion process.

• Can be useful for tracking grants.

• Inconsistent data entry limits aggregation.
• Categories can fail to capture work with multiple meanings.
• Public impact and research may be artificially separated.
• Data can become flattened.
• Simply adding categories may not solve the underlying problem.
• Interdisciplinary and collaborative work exposes weaknesses in older systems.

• An updated CV and a faculty narrative carry meaning the activity system does not.

• The strongest emerging conceptual direction from these notes is pathway to impact rather than product.

• Can existing systems capture milestones better?
• Can institutions agree on meaningful milestones and measures?
• Can impact be represented without forcing creative research into legacy equivalency models?

• Working Group institutional notes from one interview. Disclosure level: anonymized, partial, interview-based.

• How can research universities represent the pathways, milestones, collaborations, and forms of impact associated with creative and interdisciplinary scholarship without reducing that work to conventional publication-equivalency metrics?
• What kinds of creative and interdisciplinary work disappear in current faculty activity systems?
• How are institutions actually using faculty activity data?
• What information is useful for annual review versus promotion and tenure versus institutional advocacy?
• What counts as evidence in creative and applied research?
• How can collaborative work be represented?
• Can existing systems capture meaningful milestones without requiring institutions to build entirely new platforms?
• What can existing platforms do better without requiring entirely new systems?
• Where are the limits of quantitative aggregation?
• How can narrative and structured data work together?