PROCEDURES FOR FACULTY ANNUAL EVALUATIONS
Using Activity Insight
The Idaho State Board of Education requires all Idaho institutions to complete an annual evaluation for each faculty member. All tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty (0.5 FTE or more) must be evaluated each year by their department chair or unit head. The evaluation period is for the previous calendar year (i.e., spring, summer and fall terms) and is due to the Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs by the due dates established in the Academic Calendar for 2013-2014.
Activity Insight from Digital Measures is a hosted, online, electronic software program to create an expanded CV for faculty. It is used to collect, organize and build reports on faculty’s teaching, research, and service activities. Activity Insight is a customizable software solution used by more than 1,500 campuses in more than twenty-five countries.
This system not only enables you to track your faculty activity, it makes this process much easier. The information needs to be entered just once, and from that single entry many reports can then be generated, including the annual faculty evaluation, promotion and tenure documents, a current vitae, and more.
Activity Insight will also assist the Office of Institutional Research in responding to requests for faculty-related data, rather than needing to continually ask you or your chair and dean for the information. This will, ultimately, enable us to better communicate about your accomplishments. What we want to stress is that if you enter the information into this system one time (with updates or corrections as needed), we will not need to ask for it again.
Some preliminary information will be pre-loaded for faculty members new to Activity Insight.
Below is a step by step guide on accessing Activity Insight.
- To access Activity Insight, log into BengalWeb. You will find BengalWeb on ISU’s Home page (http://isu.edu).
- Click the Log into BengalWeb button.
- On the BengalWeb login screen you will see a Secure Access Login section. The section consists of 2 parts.
- Part I: Username: In this box enter the user name you were given. It is normally the first 4 letters of your last name, followed by the first 4 letters of your first name. For example: Joan Smith; her Username would be smitjoan.
- Part II: Password: This is either the password you were given or one you created during your first login to BengalWeb.
- Part III: Click the login button or press return.
- Along the top of the screen you will see several tabs. One of them is “Academics.”
- Click on the “Academics” tab.
- A new screen will come up with various headings. Similar links are grouped together under these headings. The headings are called “Channels.”
- Locate the “Faculty Tools” channel.
- In the “Faculty Tools” Channel, click the link “Activity Insight.”
- Log-in using your ISU username and password. (See Step 3, above)
Activity Insight
- After you access Activity Insight, you will see the Digital Measures, “Manage Your Activities” page, similar to the example above.
- There are two resources available at the top of the “Manage Your Activities” page. These two resources will help you learn how to use Activity Insight.
a. Video: A brief video that covers how Activity Insight works and what it can do for you. (See orange arrow).
b. User’s Guide: There is also a one-page user’s guide. That will help you navigate Activity Insight. (See red arrow) - Activity Insight is made of many different components, all of which share common basic elements (see above).
a. The Idaho State University logo.
b. A personal welcome message.
c. The Left-Hand Menu for Activity Insight.
d. Main content for each utility.i. Manage Your Activities: Enter or manage your own teaching, research, and service activities.
ii. Run Custom Reports: Run reports based on templates. - You should begin by investigating each screen on the “Manage Your Activities” page to gain a better understanding of the types of information and data that can be collected. There you will see the information that has been entered for you, and you should ensure that it is correct.
- Be sure to save any changes you make.
- You do not need to fill in every field on each screen, only those that are relevant to your own faculty responsibilities and activities.
- You can edit most of the information in Activity Insight at any time.
- If the information you wish to edit is "read-only" and it is not correct, please send an email to your department chair indicating the specific correction(s) to be made.
- Once you have edited/corrected/added to your information in Activity Insight, you, your chair and dean, and Institutional Research will be able to simply “press a button” to access the information needed for the many internal and external reports we are asked to prepare.
We recognize that there will be some work required on your part to correct any misinformation that has been preloaded, and to add information that is missing. However, we believe that Activity Insight will make the end-of-term reports, and annual and periodic (P&T, 5-year review) faculty evaluation reports much easier for you to generate, and the work to make sure you have complete and accurate information included will be worth this initial effort.
If you have questions about Activity Insight, you can use the "Contact our Helpdesk" feature which will connect you to the Digital Measures, not ISU, helpdesk. You may also contact your department chair, or Lorie Chatfield (282-3762 or chatlori@isu.edu), of the Office of Institutional Research.
Faculty members have five days in which to respond in writing to any concerns they have about the department chair’s evaluation. The chair’s evaluation and any written response(s) from the faculty member are forwarded to the dean for review and comment. The dean indicates his/her agreement/disagreement with the chair’s evaluation, add comments as needed, and provides the faculty member with a copy of the dean’s comments page for the faculty member’s signature. The dean forwards the evaluation and any written responses from the faculty member to the Provost/Vice President’s Office. The annual evaluations are included in the faculty members’ permanent files housed within the Provost/Vice President’s Office.