03/27/2008
Faculty Profiles Update
Over the past three months we provided information about the Faculty Profiles initiative in the following settings:
o Faculty Senate
o School Chair Meetings
o School Assembly Meetings
o Met with a Group of Researchers
o Various Administrator Meetings
o eCV Administrator Meetings
In these meetings we received feedback regarding
o Sensitivity and concern about the data included in faculty profiles
o Additional enhancement ideas
o The need to provide flexibility to present the information in creative ways
o eCV is difficult
The Faculty Data Governance group that has been working on this initiative has taken the feedback received and made adjustments to the Faculty Profiles system to improve the system and odds of faculty adopting this change. By no means could we address all feedback with adjustments to the system but we tried to strike a good balance. If you are interested in more details about the feedback and the adjustments that we made, review the information starting on page 2.
Feedback Details
1. Sensitivity and concern about the data included in faculty profiles
The majority of the feedback has been related to the concern of sharing sensitive data in aggregate with individuals outside the HSC. The more frequent areas of concern are identified below.
A. Office Location – Faculty have voiced concern that this may make it too easy for an activist to locate them. The Faculty Data Governance group decided to eliminate showing this information since other contact information such as phone and email are provided. We evaluated providing an opt out capability but decided that this would increase the complexity of entering information.
B. Email – Faculty brought up concerns about individuals having access to their email address and the increased possibility of receiving spam email. The email address is intentionally not displayed as a hyperlink to reduce the likelihood of crawling the database to identify addresses for spamming purposes. In addition, the HSC successfully uses spam filters to prevent spam type messages from being received. The Faculty Data Governance group feels that email is an important often used contact vehicle and decided to include it.
C. Grant Amount – Faculty have expressed concern about showing the grant award amount as shown below. For example a clinician voiced concern that he practices in some high crime areas and his patients may believe that he is receiving this funding directly. The Faculty Data Governance group reviewed other organizations profile like sites and discovered that most do not include the grant award amount and decided to not display the grant award amount.
D. Provide a mechanism to opt out sensitive publications and grants. Some publication and grant titles and descriptions can contain information that is sensitive as shown below. The Faculty Data Governance group reviewed this feedback and decided to provide the capability for a faculty member to opt-out a publication or grant if they consider it to be sensitive.
2. Enhancement ideas
Several enhancement ideas were suggested during these meetings such as:
o Add a Clinical Expertise tab
o Show Committees
o Capture Divisions
o Show Honors
o Provide capability to show all Publications
o Provide capability to prioritize Publications
o Provide the capability to include Diagrams / Storyboards
o Show Project Information
o Provide the capability to include Videos
o Show Service Information
o Include all active Teaching (not just to larger groups)
These have been added to a potential enhancement list. The Faculty Profiles system has an email a suggestion capability that will be used to capture additional enhancement ideas. After the system has been used for several months the Faculty Data Governance group will evaluate the suggestions and determine which to pursue based on the potential value and risk associated with each suggestion.
3. Providing flexibility to present the information in creative ways
Several individuals have identified opportunities to use the information in additional ways. For example we have been approached by the
o Academic Center for Excellence in Teaching (ACET) about reusing some of the information collected to provide a view that provides additional teaching information
o Promotion and Tenure about providing better views to support the promotion and tenure process
o Research community about reusing some of the information to provide a better focus on research activity
These ideas all have great potential. The Faculty Data Governance group has chosen to stay focused on getting Faculty Profiles implemented before addressing these additional views. Faculty Profiles is intended to be an institutional view that represents clinical, teaching, and research activities at a broad level. The potential to provide additional views exists and once we provide the institutional view we can work on additional more granular views.
Faculty Profiles does include web services that provide the capability for individuals to pull information from Faculty Profiles and display it in creative ways on school and departmental websites. Individuals that maintain these websites can combine the data that is included in Faculty Profiles with other content to present information in more efficient and creative ways. These services will be made available after we open up Faculty Profiles to external access.
4. eCV is difficult
As the Faculty Profiles initiative was communicated, many individuals reminded us how difficult it was to enter CV data into the eCV database. The Faculty Data Governance group has started evaluating data entry solutions to see if there is a better alternative than the current version of eCV. If we do move to another version or system in the future we will convert the data so that the HSC does not have to re-enter the information already collected.