AP Next Launches Faculty180 Pilot

AP Next officially launched the Faculty180 pilot, an exciting new system for improving faculty activity collection and curriculum vitae (CV) creation.

The system more efficiently documents faculty’s academic activities for their reviews, including their publications and/or creative work, student instructional commitments and university service contributions.

Twenty-seven faculty members from each Vice Chancellor area and all major divisions were selected to participate in the pilot.

“It is important to be involved in this pilot as an administrator to make sure the needs of the faculty are fully addressed well before we roll out the system to everyone,” stated Robert Continetti, Senior Associate Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs.

As a “faculty first” component of the Interfolio system, Faculty180 is a powerful activity reporting system that facilitates the extraction of data from various campus and third-party databases such as PubMed.

Information collected from these sources can be used to create the university's standard biography and bibliography form, known as the biobib, as well as other personal CVs.

Using the Faculty180 system eliminates the need to create manual documents each time an academic appointee is due for review. The real benefit is that faculty members who keep their information updated in the system can pull up a report at the click of the button instead of having to remember publications and accomplishments of the past two to four years.

During last month’s orientation and training session, faculty pilot participants were asked to consider the system configuration to help determine whether the needs of academics have been met, act as system testers, respond to solicitations for feedback throughout the pilot period and advise on the appearance of the new biobib format that will be used in academic reviews.

“Understanding and addressing the academic’s perspective is key to making sure the system saves faculty members time and effort while preparing their biobib. The feedback we receive from our pilot faculty will drive the rest of the implementation process,” said Cindy Palmer, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Academic Personnel Services.

The pilot is expected to run to the end of Spring Quarter 2019. All collected feedback will be passed to the project team to consider what, if any, changes need to be made prior to implementation.

Faculty180 is part of the multi-year AP Next project and part of the Interfolio system.