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 built into the platform. Since the platform can import BibTeX files, it is possible to use sites like https://www.doi2bib.org/ or https://anystyle.io to create a BibTeX file for import.
- 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 ambivalent, 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 in 2017. 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.
Beginning with the 2025-2026 academic year, Faculty Success is also used to generate CVs for campus-level processes in the University CV format. This use of the system has been initiated following seven years' use of the system for annual reporting (six years for professional track faculty). Through years of annual reporting, a segment of a faculty member's information will be available in the platform for use in generating a CV.
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."
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. 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
- To facilitate promotion package preparation through use of the University CV report
- To support Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) document preparation for proposal submissions to NSF and other government agencies. It can also aggregate current and pending projects and proposal information to assist with the preparation of the SciENcv
- To support accreditation activities
- Faculty Success will assist with merit review approval process in a future phase
- The system could be used to drive faculty web profiles
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. Data related to honorific awards, clinical trials and publications is also populated through an integration with Academic Analytics.
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 in 2017. 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 activty screen to see all awards that were current as of the end of the calendar year indicated with each record.
Kuali Research tracks sponsored research funding—both requested and awarded—from various sources, including federal agencies, the State of Maryland, universities, corporations, institutes, and foundations. It does not include extramural funding information, and gifts are typically not recorded in Kuali Research. Instead, these can be documented on the Other Awards and Gifts activity screen.
Additionally, projects in Kuali Research limit investigators to the roles predefined and tracked by the funding organizations. Only UMD personnel included in credit split allocation are designated as investigators. Changes to investigator listings require campus and, often, sponsor approval. If your role in a sponsored research project is not reflected in Kuali Research, you can document your involvement on the Other Awards and Gifts activity screen.
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.
Additionally, information on current and pending support for ongoing projects and proposals for use in SciENcv can be identified from Faculty Success, using the Current & Pending Support report. Read more...
Advising
No. The Research Advising activty 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.
Alternatively, the Bulk Data Import service can be used to get a number of advising records imported into Faculty Success at one time. Download the Research Advising bulk import template. Edit the downloaded Excel file and add the information on the students that have been advised, one student per row in the Excel table. Be sure to enter the date information for each student. Email the completed Excel file to fs-help@umd.edu to get the data imported for you to the Research Advising activity screen.
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 student feedback on course experiences' 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.
Historical student feedback from 2007-2014 is available as an archive within Faculty Success, and does include student comments. These records appear in the Student Feedback on Course Experiences (through Winter 2022) activity screen where available.
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 a publication's Contribution Type field is either blank or set to “Other.” To ensure your publications are routed to the correct sections of your report, you will need to update these records.
To manage your publication information, navigate to your profile and click the Publications heading to view your summary screen. When you edit an entry, the record will display the following details from top to bottom: publication type, title, current status, and publication date.
Any records displaying only the title, status, and date are missing a publication type. To fix this, open these records individually, select the correct Publication Type from the dropdown menu, and click Save at the bottom right.
If you have already assigned a type to all publications but some still appear in the “Other” section, they likely have “Other” selected as the publication type and are displaying an Explanation of Other on the summary screen. To route these to a specific section of your report instead of “Other Publications,” open the record, select a specific Publication Type, clear the text in the Explanation of Other field, and click Save.
Manually entering publications is an option, but to save time we highly recommend using one of the publication import options built into the platform. Since the platform can import BibTeX files, it is possible to use sites like https://www.doi2bib.org/ or https://anystyle.io to create a BibTeX file for import.
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.
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.
When appointments are included in reports such as the Annual Activity Report or the University CV, records for the same title and department with adjacent date ranges are coalesced into one entry in the output.
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.
There are a number of possible sources for an appointment in a department that you have never worked in.
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.
Unit names change over time and the unit name could be different now than it was at the time of the appointment.
It is common practice for the Transportation Services unit to create an appointment to process cash-outs from Parking. These parking-related appointments are automatically suppressed in full-service reports such as the Annual Activity Report and the University CV.
There may be appointments in your Appointments at UMD activity screen that should not be included in your University CV report. Simply check the Exclude this appointment from the University CV box at the bottom of the record editing screen to ensure that it is not included.
Reports
No. Faculty Success is not used for this type of reporting.
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. Navigate to Reports to access this tool. See this tool in action in this short demonstration video.
Additionally, to help you with successful annual report completion, consult this 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 activity 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. This short video gives an overview of the data export process.
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 activity screen for that activity type and ensure there are no records that are missing dates. Most commonly, the activity is likely missing an end date.
To do this, go to your Profile, click on the link for the activty 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.
Alternatively, if the activities are being included in your Annual Activity Report (Interactive) view, you can use the pencil tool for each of the activity entries that need updating to open the activity editing pane. Add the correct start and end dates for the activity to update the record. It will be removed from the Annual Activity Report (Interactive) view when the dates associated with the activity no longer overlap with the date range for the report.
Remember that if an activity was for just one date, enter that as the End Date for the activity record; when the end date is blank, the system treats the activity as ongoing, and it will continue to be included in future reports.
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 Reviews 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 Reviews tab 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.
You can view and access your copy of submitted report from Reviews tab in your account. Navigate to the History section to see the submitted task.
Alternatively, you can also use Reports to generate the copy of your report. Select the Reports, select Annual Activity Report, set the date range desired for the report, and click on the Run Report button.