UFV and our sister BC Association of Institutes and Universities (BCAIU) are working together to pilot an online Research and Scholarly Activity Database Project (RSADB). The RSADB pilot gathers and reports faculty and student scholarship, research, and service activities. The RSADB is a web-based information management system designed to organize and build reports on these activities. An example of a Vancouver Island University Community Report can be found at https://www2.viu.ca/docs/VIU-Report-to-the-Community.pdf .
As our Fraser Valley communities steadily increase their expectations about how UFV can contribute to economic, cultural, social, technological, environmental, and intellectual well-being, we remain committed to engaging our stakeholder communities and demonstrating that our teaching, research, and service activity leads to benefits for Canadians.
The provost has requested that departments have their faculty pilot this system and the hope is the pilot departments will take advantage of this resource and incorporate the RSADB and links into their web pages.
A Message from the Provost
At many institutions the transition to go digital has already happened or is underway. I am also very attuned to the fact that faculty time is precious and must not be wasted. Having said that, I believe we can make the digital transition to activity reporting in the same way we made the transition to email.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Eric Davis, Provost and Vice President Academic
Advantages
- Provide faculty with an easy-to-use system for recording and tracking teaching, research, scholarship, and service activities.
- Faculty members will only need to input their data once rather than reformatting and submitting their data when requested. It is important for faculty to update their data occasionally.
- Provide common faculty information across all departments with basic reports generated to serve communication, administrative and personal purposes. It will eliminate the need to frequently ask for details about faculty and student accomplishments.
- Enable individual faculty-level, department-level, or institution-level reports in a matter of seconds. The procedure for creating reports is simple: log on, enter data, and generate reports.
If your materials are in electronic form, you may copy and paste from your file directly into RSADB. You need not complete the steps in sequential order or in one session.
Rollout schedule
We plan to send email to all UFV faculty by early June, asking faculty to have their information in the pilot RSADB for August 30, 2014. We will send a message again in September with an October reminder that faculty are expected to have the information in the pilot RSADB for November 15, 2014.
Data access
This project tool is for faculty and UFV administrative use. The data is on a secure server hosted by Edudata Canada. Faculty can only see their individual information. Departments can only see the department information, not any other unit. Administrators in the designated department can see the information for faculty in their department. Deans can see the information for faculty in their decanal areas. At the central administrative level, the Associate Vice-President Research, Engagement, & Graduate Studies, the Vice-President Academic, and Edudata Canada have access to the information.