Yes, you can modify the activities as many times as you want.
Faculty Success FAQ
General
Yes, the Faculty Success team can help you with that. To get your data transferred from one category/screen to another, please send an email to fs-help@umd.edu with the request details.
While Watermark does offer a CV Import feature in Faculty Success, UMD does not have this feature enabled at this time. Our assessment of the tool indicates that it does not meet campus needs. We continue to assess the tool's functionality and advocate for improvements.
There are some ways that you can get a jump start on bulk import of your CV information
- Where possible, the system has integrations in place with other campus systems to automatically bring your data into Faculty Success. The full list of integrations - source systems, Faculty Success data screens, update schedules, etc. - is available in the Integrations table.
- Many faculty have success in adding their publications using the Import Publications feature in Faculty Success. Consult our LibGuide for more information on the import process.
- The UMD Faculty Success team can load activity data in bulk to a data screen from an Excel file (more information). If you’d like to bulk import your CV information by adding your information to Excel templates, get in touch with the UMD Faculty Success team for Excel template files and further instruction.
Only the fields with a red asterisk are required.
Use your discretion in adding additional information to the data screen form. You should plan on including any information that you would want as part of the citation for this activity in a report generated by the system.
For reporting to work properly, and for activities to be properly organized on reports, entries must have dates. For most screens you will see two spaces for each date, one for month and one for year. The day is very rarely asked for. For activities that are ongoing, only enter the start date, and leave the end date blank, to indicate it is ongoing. If the activity was only one day, or a period of time within the same month, you can enter the end date and leave the start date blank.
On a number of data screens, you are able to identify one or more collaborators involved in your activity.
On many of these screens, you are given the choice of selecting the collaborator from a list of Faculty Success users at the University of Maryland, or entering their name in the spaces to the right of the drop-down.
When you select the collaborator from the list of Faculty Success users, you create a read-only copy of the activity in that user's data. This can be a helpful way to shortcut data entry for your collaborators but it does leave them with an activity that they cannot edit nor delete.
One activity screen that does NOT have this feature is the Publications screen. This is due to the high probability of incorrectly associated record creation through the Import Publications process.
In pilot testing with Faculty Success and the Import Publications feature with this record linking capability turned on, it was found that faculty would import from a service like Web of Science, get a whole long list of matches and then quickly click through the screens to complete the import. This led to many many publications being linked to UMD faculty with common last names since many of the import services only reference the first initial. The linked publications cannot be edited or deleted by the linked faculty member, which thereby left them with many erroneous entries in their Publications records.
If you have publications that you've entered into Faculty Success and you'd like to share the records with your UMD collaborators, reach out to the Faculty Success team (fs-help@umd.edu) and we can work with you to share those records.
When in doubt about which drop-down option best fits your activity, you should think about how you have reported these items in the past and how your department usually reports these types of activities.
If you are still unsure, you should discuss the options with your department chair, research center director or dean.
If you are still unsure, you can contact the Faculty Success team via fs-help@umd.edu for guidance.
Grant panel/review activities should be entered in the Editorships, Editorial Boards, and Reviewing Activities screen. For Contribution Type choose Reviewing Activity for Agencies and Foundation; for Position/Role choose Reviewer.
Your first order of business in terms of data entry will be to enter everything that you would normally include for the current annual reporting cycle. After that you can begin to curate or back-fill your historical data that may be used in other reports.
Some screens' data is populated through integrations with other campus systems - Elevate/Workday, SIS, CourseEvalUM and Kuali Research.
Data from those systems cannot be edited on the data screen.
The Integrations table provides details on the screens that have imported data, the source systems, update frequency and methods for handling errors with the imported data. Note that each of these screens also includes a Notes & Annotations field which can be used to clarify any error that can not be corrected in the source system, should that situation arise.
Other screens may have data that was pulled from the Lyterati system. Every effort was made to bring this data in cleanly and to populate the correct set of fields. However, you should review the data loaded on these screens to make sure that the information has been correctly mapped and that the data for your activities is accurate. If you need bulk changes to data on a particular screen, contact the UMD Faculty Success team to request assistance.
Faculty Success is used for annual reporting, and you should start this process as soon as possible to give yourself ample time to acclimate to the platform and work out any questions you may have, as well as ensuring plenty of time to enter your information.
We have designed these screens to be used by faculty from all disciplines across campus, so some screens may have fields that don't pertain to you. You can either leave those fields blank, or if the field is required, fill it in with the most logical option for your department. For example, "Was this compensated or pro bono?" may not make sense to you, and that is ok. For most departments the selection here should be "Pro Bono," so we have set this to default to that option. For those of you in departments with different requirements for this data, you may need to change this selection to "Compensated."
Login & Access Related
Faculty Success, like many other online software platforms, adds and updates functionality in the platform on a regular basis, with product updates every two weeks.
Updates to the platform are released every other Tuesday. With many of the releases, Faculty Success now displays a Release Notes modal/popup which provides more information on the recent changes to the platform. Once a user logs in, they can click to read more, which will remove the modal for the remainder of the duration. When the Release notes pop-up goes live, it will be from Tuesday to the following Wednesday.
Data
At this time you cannot pull your data from Faculty Success into your web profile page, but this is a capability of the platform and the university is currently exploring implementation of this feature. We encourage you to let your department chair, research center director or dean know that you are interested in this functionality.
- For annual faculty activity data reporting
- For mandatory reporting requirements at the system (USM), state and federal level
- Faculty Success can facilitate dossier preparation and proposal submissions
- To support accreditation activities
- Faculty Success will assist with merit review approval process in a future phase
- The system may be used to drive faculty web profiles in the future
Some screens' data is populated through integrations with other campus systems - Elevate/Workday, SIS, CourseEvalUM, Kuali Research, the Graduate School, Faculty Affairs, UM Ventures and Faculty Senate. Data from those systems cannot be edited on the data screen.
The Integrations table provides details on the screens that have imported data, the source systems, update frequency and methods for handling errors with the imported data. Note that each of these screens also includes a Notes & Annotations field which can be used to clarify any error that can not be corrected in the source system, should that situation arise.
Other screens may have data that was pulled from the Lyterati system. Every effort was made to bring this data in cleanly and to populate the correct set of fields. However, you should review the data loaded on these screens to make sure that the information has been correctly mapped and that the data for your activities is accurate. If you need bulk changes to data on a particular screen, contact the UMD Faculty Success team to request assistance.
Grants and Financial Awards
These awards, gifts, and grants can be entered on the Other Awards screen.
Data on the ORA Managed Awards screen are provided through the Office of Research Administration (ORA) from the Kuali Research system, and were current as of the end of the calendar year indicated with each record. The data pull includes all proposals that had activity in the calendar year, regardless of outcome. Proposals without any activity during the calendar year will not be included.
If there seems to be an error, requests for corrections to Kuali Research for any active projects can be made through your department's business administrator.
Data on this screen are provided through the Office of Research Administration (ORA) from the Kuali Research system, and were current as of the end of the calendar year indicated with each record. The data pull includes all award accounts that had activity in the calendar year. Award accounts without any activity during the calendar year will not be included.
You can check the Active ORA-Managed Awards screen to see all awards that were current as of the end of the calendar year indicated with each record.
If there seems to be an error, requests for corrections to Kuali Research for any active projects can be made through your department's business administrator.
It is possible to see a project or award listed multiple times on the ORA Managed Awards summary screen, if you are listed as an investigator on more than one account for the award. If there seems to be an error, requests for corrections to Kuali Research for any active projects can be made through your department's business administrator.
NIH and NSF require use of SciENcv for biographical sketch submissions; the Biosketch screens and reports that were available in Faculty Success no longer generate the correct output for biographical sketch submissions to these and other government agencies.
Faculty Success does offer an integration with ORCiD. Faculty can enable the Data Sharing provision with ORCiD and their publications that include DOIs will be exported to ORCiD. ORCiD has the capability to send the ORCiD data to SciENcv for biographical sketch creation.
If you hae authenticated with ORCiD in Faculty Success through the Publications Import feature, you can choose to have your publications automatically exported to ORCiD through the Data Sharing Settings, found in the Activities area. The export to ORCiD happens on a weekly basis. Read more about authenticating ORCiD in Faculty Success and enabling automatic exports through Data Sharing Settings.
Advising
No. The Research Advising data screen captures information for one student per data screen. The Duplicate feature can help reduce the data entry burden. On the Research Advising summary screen, click the checkbox to the right of an entry that is similar to the student you need to add. Then use the Duplicate button to create a copy. Edit that copy, updating the fields as needed to describe the research advising activity.
The Research Advising screen is to list specific students or post-docs you have advised or mentored. The Curricular Advising screen is where you enter the number of students advised each year on curriculum/academics.
For terminal master's degrees (e.g. MBA or MFA) please select Master's.
Scheduled Teaching and Course Feedback
Please use CourseEvalUM for a more detailed view of your course evaluations and to view college averages and student comments. If you have questions about the data on this screen, contact the CourseEvalUM Help Center.
In order to support various faculty review processes, Faculty Success includes results for university-level course evaluation items that are available to administrators. Faculty members can view their course evaluation results for all items (including department/college and student-interest items) directly through CourseEvalUM.
In order to ensure everyone receives credit for all of their activities, courses are listed here in the same way they are listed in the SIS system.
Please use CourseEvalUM for a more detailed view of your course evaluations and to view college averages and student comments. If you have questions about the data on this screen, contact the CourseEvalUM Help Center.
Publications
This happens when the Contribution Type field for the publication has not been set, or is set to “Other.” To correct this and ensure your publications are routed to the correct sections of your report, you will need to curate those records. To do this, navigate to the summary screen for your publications. You will notice that each record will display, from top to bottom: the publication type, the title, the current status, and the date published. Any records that list only the title, status, and date, are the records that do not have a publication type selected. You can go into these records individually, select the correct Publication Type from the dropdown, and then save the record by clicking “Save” in the upper right. If you have already ensured that all of your publications have a Publication Type selected, but you still have publications showing up in the “Other” section of your report, those publications have “Other” selected for the publication type, and are displaying the “Explanation of Other” on the summary screen. If you would like to make sure that these publications are routed to a particular section of your report, rather than “Other Publications,” you will need to go into those records individually and select a Publication Type other than “Other,” and delete the information in “Explanation of Other,” and then save the record.
Manually entering publications is an option, but to save time we highly recommend using one of the publication import options built into the platform. For help with importing or manually adding publications, refer to our LibGuide.
It is true that on a number of the activity screens in Faculty Success - Presentations, Patents, Inventions, Creative Scholarship, etc. - it is possible to link to other UMD faculty directly as activity collaborators are being identified. This results in the creation of a linked copy of the activity in that UMD faculty's activity data and can be a nice convenience.
These linked records are owned by the faculty member who created the record and are only editable by the record owner.
However, this feature is not available with Publication records and this is due to unintended consequences of records brought in through the Import Publications feature of Faculty Success.
In pilot testing with Faculty Success and the Import Publications feature with this record linking capability turned on, it was found that faculty would import from a service like Web of Science, get a whole long list of matches and then quickly click through the screens to complete the import. This led to many many publications being linked to UMD faculty with common last names since many of the import services only reference the first initial. The linked publications cannot be edited or deleted by the linked faculty member, which thereby left them with many erroneous entries in their Publications records.
If you have publications that you've entered into Faculty Success and you'd like to share the records with your UMD collaborators, reach out to the Faculty Success team (fs-help@umd.edu) and we can work with you to share those records.
Throughout the course of customizing the platform for UMD, pilot testers and the advisory group have overwhelmingly responded that, rather than the implementation team loading the “messy” data pulled from Lyterati, they would prefer to use import options built into the platform to manually upload publications. This allows for cleaner, more personally curated records. For help with importing or manually adding publications, refer to our LibGuide.
Appointments at UMD Screen
If an appointment was terminated and replaced with another appointment, the appointment duration may only be one day. Another reason may be that the appointment was for a Non-Standard Payment and was for a lump sum, causing it to have a duration of only one day.
Tenure track and tenured faculty should always have an appointment in their tenure home. When the faculty member's paid appointment is in a unit other than their tenure home, a non-paid appointment should be in place in the tenure home unit. This might result in what appears to be duplicate appointments, but they each have their purpose. Alternatively, if an appointment is continuing, but a change that cannot be made on the existing appointment is necessary, the faculty member may have two appointments that appear on the surface to be duplicates, but at the detailed level are not.
Overloads are processed by the unit paying for the overload, not necessarily the primary appointment unit. The faculty member may or may not be aware of the specific unit name. Also, unit names change over time and the unit name could be different now than it was at the time of the appointment.
Reports
No. At this point, faculty will continue to submit OPA reports through opa.umd.edu.
One way to successfully complete your Annual Activity Report is to use the Annual Activity Report (Interactive) view of your activity data. This tool presents your Annual Activity Report in an online tool that lets you edit and add entries in the sections of the report, without having to know which activity screen you need for a particular report section. The Annual Activity Report (Interactive) tool is a good way to review your activities for the calendar year and make updates and additions as needed.
Additionally, to help you with successful annual report completion, we have a matrix of typical activities and their activity screens listed in the Where Does THIS Go page.
Yes, Faculty Success has a feature for creating a custom reports. In order to build your own report, please go to the "Reports" menu screen, click on the "Create a New Report" (in the upper right of the Reports screen) to create a new blank report, or start from a custom Vita (vendor-supplied Vita, not the University CV format), and modify it to meet your custom report needs. You can save your custom report and run it repeatedly in the future.
It is also possible to export data from one or more screens using "Create a New Report." Use the "Data Export" option. By default, the Data Export report includes data from all screens; use Option 3: Data to Include to select particular screens for export. The default output format is CSV.
Most likely this is occurring because the activities are missing date information. In order to correct this issue you will need to go to the screen for that activity type and ensure there are no records that are missing dates. To do this, go to the main menu, click on the link for the screen you want, and then look at the summary screen for records that do not show dates. You can click on those records to open them up and update the date information. Once all of your records have dates, you can run your report again and those old activities will no longer be listed.
These two options are very similar. With either option you can run your Faculty Annual Activity Report with the ability to customize the report dates and file format. The difference is that, with the Reports button, you also have the option to select Create a New Report (in the upper right of the Reports screen) to create a new blank report or a custom Vita. Once you have selected one of these options you can build a report to your own requirements and save it so that you can run the same report repeatedly in the future.
Workflow Related
Yes, Faculty Success includes a feature to recall the submitted reports which are pending for approval. In order to make new changes to your report, please follow these steps:
- Go to "History" section in your "Workflow" tab.
- Click on the submitted task and click on the "Recall" option(located on top right corner) to recall your submission from approval phase.
- You can review your report using the Annual Activity Report (Interactive) report tool; use the tool to review your report and update or add activities in areas of the report that need revision.
- Once you have updated your activities and are ready to submit, you should be able to access your entry in "Workflow" from the Inbox listing.
- Open your task entry and click on "Refresh Report" before submitting.
Please note that completed and approved reports can not be recalled.
Please see our short how-to video on Review Faculty Submission. Alternatively, you can also refer to our Unit Approver Guide.
Please see our short how-to video on Report Submission. Alternatively, you can also refer to our Faculty Submission Guide.
Faculty Success generates the copy of your annual activity report when the workflow task gets assigned to you. This copy includes the data available in Faculty Success before the task assignment.
Each day that you access the Workflow submission step, you will likely see a blue box at the top of the screen recommending that you refresh any reports attached to the Workflow submission. There is a "Refresh All" button in this blue box that will accomplish this. After clicking the "Refresh All" button, the blue box and its associated text will no longer be shown at the top of the screen.
You can also manually refresh a report. To the right of the report name and the last updated date/time, there is a circular arrow button. When this button is clicked a popup message appears that says: "This action will update the attached report based on the information available under Manage Activities. This action cannot be undone."
This message is simply an informational prompt indicating that the Faculty Success report will be refreshed with all the current data present in the system for calendar year after the "Refresh Report" button is clicked.
To ensure all your changes are included for the submission, be sure to use the Refresh Report feature, and choose "Yes" at the prompt.
In addition, we also recommend previewing the copy of your Annual Activity Report using the Rapid Report tool from Activities, before proceeding with the submission step. Be sure to use the correct date range when generating the report using this method.
You can view and access your copy of submitted report from "Workflow" tab in your account. Navigate to the "History" option under "Workflow" to see the submitted task.
Alternatively, you can also use Reports OR Rapid Reports sections to generate the copy of your report. Select the Reports/Rapid Reports tab, select "Annual Activity Report"(for Reports option only) and click on the "Run Report" button.
Please make sure to verify the date range when generating the report using this method.