Northeastern Illinois University streamlines faculty reviews with Watermark Faculty Success

There were two big challenges before moving to Faculty Success. Lots of administrative support and burden to make sure reviews got to the next stage in the process. Second, lots of faculty time downloading and manipulating files to get them linked within their accomplishment tables.

The Faculty Success implementation was particularly beneficial and useful because the Watermark person leading the effort was formerly employed by a university which used Faculty Success. The best experiences I have are when someone teaching something actually lived in the trenches.

If people read the guides and manuals, the process can run almost on its own. In our previous system we had to send out manual emails to each review stage. Plus, the extra work training faculty and troubleshooting linking issues was very time consuming. Faculty Success has a streamlined process with their RTP module to automatically move reviews through the system. Now faculty need less support and we have more content faculty completing the process. This year we implemented instructor reviews to standardize a process that was previously a departmental task. Now we have a process that can be easily completed by everyone.

The annual activity report is the biggest help. In [our previous products] it took 7-14 clicks to link a file into someone’s portfolio. Now the tables and links are done automatically based on the documentation you upload into the system. The system also retains the documentation in history and, based on the programmed dates of the report, the reviewers can see this information without faculty having to copy and paste when multiple years have to be documented.

The ability to integrate Course Evaluations & Surveys has also been a nice convenient bonus for me and a selling point for faculty, as it was one less item for faculty to manually upload to their activities section of Faculty Success.

Watermark tries to listen to their institutional partners about their ideas and concerns about how the application works (or doesn’t work). This is accomplished by having advisory boards, an ideas portal, and visiting various informal/unofficial consistency groups. It’s important that system admins do their pre-work as they will only gain from the process if they’re as equally as engaged as the Watermark personnel. Bring real life scenarios or cases to the implementation to make sure your needs are met.