North Dakota State University

view frequently asked questions below:

2017 (or the current year) is the default placeholder year that our Data Entry Assistants used because a year was not provided on your vita and was required by the system.

ActivityInsight (AI) is a highly customizable web-based activity reporting system provided by Digital Measures (DM).  We will use DM to collect and report information about teaching, research, and service accomplishments of faculty in an easy to use digital format.

The Provost initiated implementation of DM with the goal of facilitating electronic submission and review of documents for the faculty promotion and tenure process. ActivityInsight (AI) from Digital Measures was chosen in consultation with academic deans. Several colleges were either using or were in the process of purchasing DM for faculty activity reporting. The Office of the Provost provided funding for five year contract for campus wide implementation ($165,831, five year total). The Office of the Provost, ITS, OIRA, Academic Colleges, and a number of other offices have provided staff support for data entry and validation.

Faculty have read/write privileges to their own data. Deans office have read/write privileges to their college data. Office of the Provost and OIRA have read/write privileges to all data in DM.

PTE portfolios, CVs, including NSF and NIH formats, Annual Faculty Activity Reports, Unit Annual Reports, Annual university awards, committee work, Public engagement outreach and international activities, Campus website faculty profiles (will be created), Program Review Reports (will be created), Assessment Reports (will be created), Institutional and disciplinary accreditation reports (ABET, AACSB, HLC, etc.) (will be created), and NSF ADVANCE 12 Indicators (will be created).

DM is expected to make faculty reporting requirements more efficient and eliminate requests for the same information needed for multiple uses in different formats. DM is expected to make existing data collection or reporting requirements more efficient or effective as well as allow access to more complete and accurate information on faculty activities. Specifically, DM will assist in the assembly of some of the information required for unit annual reports, assessment reports, and program review documents; make more efficient and complete the preparation of both institutional and disciplinary accreditation reports; allow for more efficient collection of course syllabi and CVs for accreditation report; enable collection of faculty engagement activities and service contributions; help match faculty research focus areas with external funding opportunities; provide a mechanism for better publicizing of faculty accomplishments; and maintain an archival history of faculty accomplishment.

Used by over 1,500 colleges worldwide, DM has made a fundamental commitment to the security of all data within their system, with: all data collected over secure, 128-bit SSL-encrypted connections; firewall-protected servers and an intrusion detection system; fully redundant servers in a Sun-owned and managed data center; five nightly backups to geographically-dispersed location; and Full Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance.

For a full list of security measures, you can visit the Security and Privacy page on the Digital Measures site at www.digitalmeasures.com/ActivityInsight/secure.htm .”

For the 2016 annual report, faculty members should enter their activities from 2016.

Faculty activities must be manually entered: 1) to ensure adherence to DM formatting guidelines; 2) for NDSU to realize the full potential of DM’s reporting functionality.

Activity Insight supports HTML and one can use the Web for both import and export.

Yes. Usually the first or closest NDSU author or the PI enters the citation.

The format of the vita is completely flexible down to the college level. DM does not impose any sort of format restriction. An individual can always maintain a separate vita, of course, but formats are customized for departments, for accreditation reporting, for grant applications, etc., with no limit on the number of formats. 

Yes, special symbols, diacritical marks, foreign alphabets and mathematical symbols can be entered. DM uses UTF-8 (specified by ISO 10646), which supersedes ISO 8859. UTF-8 encompasses all of the character sets supported by the older specification and more (mostly Asian) languages.

Special formatting such as boldface is supported at departmental and higher level reports by custom design, but not at the individual CV level.

No, not unless the NDSU specifies that there should be a limit.

Microsoft Word documents can be copied onto a clipboard for cutting and pasting into fields on the input screens, but formatting is not preserved for that purpose.

Close to 50 institutions use it campus-wide, and many more use it in some subset annual activities first; then each department learns, customizes, makes changes, and adds reports.

There are no additional or hidden costs. Customization, updating, changing or adding features to DM were all part of the contract.

Yes.

Faculty can use information in DM to create their PTE dossier. Administrators and evaluation committees use DM for electronic processing of PTE reviews. Faculty/staff can manage their CVs, including output options for NIH and NSF bio sketches. Information in DM is used to automatically. update faculty, department/college web pages. Faculty use information in DM for their annual activity reports. DM is used to integrate data from other campus systems and thus reducing redundancy in data entry. Accurate data is available for institutional analysis. Academic units can generate reports for assessment and program review. Academic units are able to generate customized reports for accreditation. Information in DM is used to identify research interests and expertise to foster collaborations. Reduced need to build, maintain and support duplicative systems. Reduced number errors and out-of-date information in our campus systems, reports, and websites.

Implementation Steering Committee is composed of faculty and staff from Colleges, Registration and Records, Institutional Research, ITS, and Office of the Provost. Implementation steering committee is charged with identifying the required data elements, data entry screens/fields, reports, access, and processes that will enable implementation of DM for NDSU. The implementation steering committee will conduct workshops as needed, gather input from stakeholders, develop a Web FAQ, custom screen testing, and completing other preliminary preparations in advance of campus-wide implementation.

1) To use a special character in a text field, such as a Greek letter, a superscript, or a subscript, copy and paste the character or symbol from a separate Word document, following these steps: Open a Word document. Click on the Insert tab near the top left of the screen. Click on the small down triangle to the right of the blue “Ω” icon above the word “Symbols” found on the far right side of the toolbar to see your choices. (You may have to click on it twice to open the pop-up box.) If the symbol is not in the original pop-up box, click on “More Symbols” at the bottom of the pop-up box, then scroll until you find the symbol you need. Click on the symbol you have chosen and it will be inserted into your open Word document. Copy the symbol from the Word document and paste it either directly in the appropriate DM text field or in the PasteBoard. 2) Another option for subscripts and superscripts is to use HTML tags within your DM entry: Subscript: _{(without spaces) and}(without spaces) to open and close the HTML tags for subscripts.

Example: _{Type in Subscript Text}, then normal text 

Resulting text look like _{Subscript Text}, compared to normal text.

Superscript: ^and to open and close the HTML tags for superscripts. Example: ^{Type Superscript Text}, then type normal text Resulting text looks like ^{Superscript Text}, compared to normal text