University to adopt Watermark for integrated approach to faculty dossier assembly and evaluation in fall 2021

Clemson University has chosen to use Watermark’s faculty activity reporting and course evaluation solutions campus-wide, leveraging Watermark’s data integration in support of its faculty review and promotion and tenure processes.

With a focus on increasing efficiencies and innovation in its faculty activity reporting, annual review, and promotion and tenure processes, Clemson will administer one centralized system for the entire campus, starting fall 2021. Prior to Watermark, the University supported three separate homegrown systems (Faculty Activity System, eForm3 and eTPR) to conduct annual faculty evaluations as well as promotion and tenure decisions. By choosing Watermark, Clemson will eliminate a host of manual, redundant processes that required parallel curation by faculty and administrators, will improve consistency of communication and workflow of documentation and evaluation processes, and will reduce the overhead required to maintain three separate systems.

To select Watermark, Clemson University assembled a team of faculty, staff and administrators to review tools enabling workflows and processes supporting more accurate and expanded information assembly capabilities, including that of faculty activity data. The University reinforces its commitment to support faculty success in the academy in research, teaching and service by using Watermark as an integrated faculty information collection and reporting system. The tools in this system offer dynamic methods to collect and facilitate curation of faculty activities such as research, publications, presentations, invited installations, professional development, internal and external service, instructional load and awards.

With Watermark, faculty can easily store artifacts of their work, such as full-text files of publications, presentations, grant award letters, and audio and video recordings of performances, and then generate curriculum vitae from the information entered. As an added benefit, when faculty upload vita information into Watermark, Clemson will be able to produce activity reports for the purposes of annual departmental and University wide review and celebrations recognizing faculty accomplishments.

“We’re excited to make faculty activity reporting, evaluation, and promotion and tenure processes easier to navigate, update and track using Watermark,” said Amy Lawton-Rauh, associate provost for faculty affairs. “This system will streamline the workflow, improve the interface and substantially improve our capabilities for providing a holistic picture of the faculty experience while providing important tools useful for faculty developing collaborations and seeking creative ways to capture and communicate their impact and future goals in research, teaching and service.”

“Extending the life cycle of Clemson’s data marks an important step in helping the University centralize many of its core institutional processes and increase efficiencies at multiple levels,” said Matt Bartel, president of Digital Measures by Watermark.  “At Watermark, we look to ease these institutional data collection processes so faculty and administrators can focus more on using their data to make improvements to student learning and institutional outcomes.”

With Watermark, Clemson is poised to streamline and centralize its management of faculty activity reporting, faculty evaluation, as well as promotion and tenure processes, in order to continue making meaningful improvements at all levels.