A good sign! I hope to be doing these myself in a few years.
Sue N. Averill, associate provost for faculty affairs at Kent State University, has one overwhelming memory of her first few weeks on the job last year: a mountain of white-plastic bins looming over her head.
In early December, containers typically used to transport mail began piling up in the provost’s office. Each was filled with paper-stuffed binders from faculty members building their cases for promotion and tenure. The bins took up two whole walls in a conference room, where they were kept under lock and key.
Not only did the binders use colossal amounts of paper, Ms. Averill realized, but the cumbersome system slowed the evaluation process to a crawl. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’” she says.
That “better way” will begin this fall, when Kent State faculty members have the option of submitting their dossiers electronically; digital dossiers will very likely become the only way to go in a year.
The push to go digital, currently under way at institutions such as Kent State, Virginia Tech, and a few others, is being driven in part by a desire to save paper (St. John’s University reported that it had saved 225,000 pieces a year when its process went online, in 2008) and in part to make it easier to include forms of scholarship that aren’t paper-based. The push is not as widespread as one might think. Though individual departments at some institutions have moved to digital dossiers, universitywide efforts have been hampered because breaking away from tradition is tough, and the technology involved doesn’t always meet expectations.
Professors at the university now have a choice. They can scan paper documents and upload them as files to be arranged in a digital system custom-tailored for dossier creation. Or they can punch holes in hundreds of sheets of paper to be sorted and then stuffed in a three-ring binder. Officials hope faculty members pick the former.
A big attraction of digital dossiers, some professors note, is that it’s easier to include elements of scholarship and research that couldn’t be captured as well in a binder. “You can post video and audio of your teaching. You can take pictures of art and include it,” says David W. Dalton, an associate professor of instructional technology at Kent State. “You can hyperlink to things. You can really tell your story in new ways.”
Gordon J. Murray, an assistant professor of electronic media, remembers putting DVD’s and CD’s in plastic sleeves to go in his binder, along with printed screen shots of Web sites he’d worked on. Mr. Murray has just started testing Kent State’s e-portfolio system, and plans to use it to assemble his application for reappointment, due in early September. “I’m grateful that the university is forward-thinking enough to to at least attempt to do this,” he says.
Electronic tenure applications are also touted as more accessible to reviewers. With paper binders, people typically “check out” the documents they need to look over. That means only one person can look at a binder at a time and generally does so only during business officers. Files can also become disorganized from repeated handling, or sections can go missing. Digital dossiers mean “faculty reviewers can look at them and they can all do it simultaneously and from anywhere,” Mr. Dalton says.
