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.
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
- For annual faculty activity data reporting
- For mandatory reporting requirements at the system (USM), state and federal level
- Faculty Success can facilitate dossier preparation
- 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
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.
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.
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. The Mentorship screen is for your mentoring of junior faculty, visiting faculty, and other professional-level mentoring.
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.
Please use the Course Experiences website for a more detailed view of your course feedback results and student comments. If you have questions about the data on this screen, contact the CourseExp 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.
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
To help you with successful annual report completion, we have included an Annual Report Data Fields guide that maps each section of the report back to the relevant screen in Digital Measures where the data is drawn from.
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
Please see our short how-to video on Report Submission. Alternatively, you can also refer to our Faculty Submission Guide.