To achieve that goal, the OU Elevate team works collaboratively with academic units and cross-functional teams to create, test, document, and implement multistep processes that guide academic units in developing a transparent workload distribution and evaluation system customized to departments’ needs and their disciplinary context.
Designed to account for the full scope of faculty contributions in teaching, research, and service, this integrated model encompasses tools, rubrics, workload distribution guides, and workflow processes that can be institutionalized and eventually disseminated to other institutions of higher ed. Valid and consistent evaluation metrics ensure that the model can be reliably used to incentivize faculty to engage in impactful work valued by multiple stakeholders.
To re-envision faculty workload distribution and annual performance evaluation, the OU Elevate team has outlined the following five phases:
This synergic interaction is designed to result in institutional transformation that advances excellence in teaching, research, and service.
Please read more about the five activities in the next section.
Even before receiving the grant, the nine scholars who form the OU Elevate team began to create tools for a transparent annual evaluation process. The ADVANCE funding has allowed them to capitalize on what they have learned while creating the conditions to address their preliminary findings. In fact, their next endeavor is to develop a comprehensive toolkit eventually applicable to the evaluation process and workload distribution of faculty from all disciplines.
At its final stage, the toolkit will encompass
After developing rubrics, guidelines and taxonomies in collaboration with committees and groups, the OU Elevate team will engage STEM departments and all interested faculty members to contribute their insight. Participants will work collaboratively to analyze the tools and recommend improvements. Progress toward the refinement of the tools will be communicated to shared governance bodies and university administration.
Once the tools undergo the refinement process, two pilot tests will be launched, each involving three academic units matched with three control units. Working as a cohort, the three pilot units will participate in unit assessment, exercises, discussions, and training, to result in a revised annual evaluation process with the tools customized to reflect what each unit values in teaching, research, and service.
The second round of pilot testing will benefit from the experience of the first, as lessons learned will be documented and tools will continue to be refined. Although the OU Elevate team will work closely with three pilot units to implement the new evaluation process and workload distribution, more units can and are encouraged to participate.
The implementation revised annual evaluation processes among all STEM units is enabled through the availability of the final self-guided toolkit. Existing institutional structures will be leveraged to institutionalize the periodic reviews of departmental workload distribution and annual performance evaluation in ways that signal transparency and accountability.
The institutionalization process involves the following actions:
In the final phase of the project, the OU Elevate team will disseminate the toolkit and the project findings among institutions of higher ed. After undergoing multiple iterations of refinement and validation, the toolkit will be available via this website along with a webinar that explains how to use it. This website will also collect peer-review articles and reports ensuing from the project, which result in sharing findings broadly. We encourage you to visit this and other pages to stay updated with the progress of the OU Elevate project.
We also invite you to contact us via email at advance@ou.edu.
