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Ask an ORCS:  What is the status of the Research and Creative Scholarship accomplishment metrics?

Scott Mills: 9/13/18

Problem and Question: Last spring the ORCS office worked with the faculty to develop a diverse set of metrics that captured our faculty’s diverse breadth of Research and Creative Scholarship and that could be used to trumpet our accomplishments at the individual/department/college/program/university level.  What’s the status of that?

Answer: Short answer is that we are working on it!  We got a lot done spring 2018 under tight timeline. Here’s the overview of what we got done.

Purpose: Research and Creative Scholarship (RCS) at University of Montana plays an essential role in improving human and planetary well-being, as well as in student recruitment, retention, and overall success.  Both the University and RCS Strategic Plans underscore the critical importance of RCS to the mission of the university.  And yet, no platform currently exists to recognize the breadth and depth of our Research and Creative Scholarship (RCS) at the University, community, national and international level.  Therefore, our goal was to assemble a manageable list of RCS metrics (roughly 50 or less) that enumerate the broad span of RCS productivity at UM. 

What We Are Doing Now: We are trying to find ways to pre-populate as many of the metrics as possible, for each faculty member each year.  This is critical to ensure high response rate, which is critical for the whole idea to work.  We are examining several cloud-based research services platforms.  The devil is in the details (and in the cost) of these, but we are working on it.  As we progress in figuring out how to populate the metrics,  I will reach out to some beta tester faculty.