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Digital Measures
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated 8/31/2006

1. What is Digital Measures?

Activity Insight™ from Digital Measures is the most reliable, versatile and secure web-based information management system available for managing and reporting on your faculty and staff's teaching, research and service activities. Activity Insight™ is used by colleges and universities across the globe to manage critical information for accreditation and personnel management.

Please visit the website at: http://www.digitalmeasures.com/ under “Activity Insight” to review the DEMO of Digital Measures for use by a Faculty Member and by a College Administrator. This is a 3-minute demonstration to help you become familiar with UI’s system which has been customized for our reports.

Digital Measures helps you determine the specific activity data and reports you need to satisfy your reporting requirements.

Existing data can be loaded from your campus data system, your faculty and staff can also input their own data or support staff can maintain the data for them.

Administrators aggregate individual faculty information and generate reports for accreditation and internal reviews.

2. What are the benefits of using this system?
3. What does it cost?

The five-contract with Digital Measures requires each college to pay $2500 annually for up to 200 faculty members per college. Those colleges with more than 200 faculty members pay an additional $1000. The first year of this contract has been paid for by UI central administration, but the remaining four years will be paid by the college each October.

4. When will it be launched?

The formal launch of UI-Digital Measures will be August 14, 2006. Department administrators should notify their faculty to log into the system by August 31, 2006 to retrieve their passwords. If there are new faculty, the department administrator can add new faculty names at their discretion and delete faculty who have left the University.

5. How much faculty data has to be placed in the system initially? by what date?

One year of data for FY05-06 annual faculty performance. This information should be completed by January 1, 2007 at the latest, but it is up to each college administrator to request the earlier date, if necessary, for annual evaluations.

For assistant and associate professors who are preparing for the tenure and promotion process in FY07, they should be requested to include the appropriate years of data according to FSH guidelines. Beginning in FY008, an electronic version of T&P portfolios will be requested.

Each college is in various stages of accreditation review so it will be left to the college administrator to determine how much historical information needs to be included in the dataset.

For NWCCU, institutional accreditation reports, the University needs 5 years of back information. Progress reports to NWCCU are required following the 2004 Review.

6. Who has access to the data? How will this information be used?

This tool is for faculty and college administrative use. The data is on a secure server hosted by Digital Measures. Faculty can only see their individual information. Colleges can only see the college information, not other colleges. Administrators in the designated college can see the information for faculty in their college. At the central administrative level, the only person who has access to this information is the Director of Institutional Research, Dr. Archie George. Dr George needs access to this information to fulfill institutional reports to SBOE, NWCCU, and other national reporting agencies using aggregate data.

7. Are the records secure?
8. How much time will it take to enter the data?

From the 30 UI beta testers of this system in the spring, 2006 semester, the average amount of time to put in one year’s worth of data was about 2 hours. This amount of time does not exceed the traditional method of completing three separate forms (CV, position description, and annual evaluation forms). Of course, this assumes a faculty member has records that they will cut and paste from electronic files.

9. If we are using Digital Measures to store data on our Curriculum Vitae, will we have to continue sending our CV info to the Faculty Secretary’s office?

The current policy in the UI Faculty-Staff Handbook (Section 1570 B-7) states that this information will be kept by the Faculty Secretary. The current policy will be reviewed by the 2006-07 Faculty Council. In the Digital Measures beta testing period, it was found that most faculty keep their current CV on their personal computer and regularly update that version of the CV. Digital Measures can allow you to maintain only ONE curriculum vitae and generate a complete, up-to-date CV with a click of a button on the report generator.

10. Who will enter the data?

It is strongly encouraged that faculty enter the data at their discretion since this tool is available on a 7/24/365 schedule. Faculty are being requested to enter one-year of data. It would be difficult for secretarial staff to enter the current annual performance activities for a faculty member (FY05-06). Furthermore, if faculty enter their data, they will quickly see how convenient and easy it is to input data at their leisure throughout the year when they complete an activity.

11. How do we know if the data has been correctly entered?

Currently, faculty enter their individual data on CVs, position descriptions, and annual evaluations and the same expectations will be applied for Digital Measures. The integrity of the data must be annually reviewed by the department administrator during the regular annual evaluation process. It is at the administrator’s discretion, to ask for verification of publications, teaching evaluation scores, etc.

12. Faculty have to signed their annual position description and annual evaluation. How will they sign it on Digital Measures?

Digital Measures will only generate the reports, i.e., the position description and the annual evaluation. If the administrator wants a signed copy of these documents, then the faculty member will have to print off a hardcopy of the report and then the signed hardcopy will remain with the department officer. There are many complexities with electronic signatures, so it is best to maintain hardcopies by the faculty member and the department administrator.

13. Can this system be used for compiling info for P&T portfolio?

Yes, but for FY05-06 we will continue to use hardcopy portfolios. It would be too rushed for faculty under review this year to submit electronic portfolios. However, for next year (FY06-07), we will move from hardcopy T&P portfolios to an electronic version using the reports from Digital Measures.

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