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.
At Kent State, Ms. Averill thought the time was right. “Our travel reimbursement and sick-leave reporting and other things have all become electronic, so why not this?” she says.
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.
Privacy Concerns
Some faculty members have reservations about shedding paper. Scanning in years of paperwork can be a daunting task. And at Kent State, questions surfaced about how secure information would be, Ms. Averill says. In response, the institution has a password-protected system that allows professors to select specific groups, such as tenured faculty members, who can see the Web-based portfolios, says Mr. Dalton, who developed the software the institution uses.
Mr. Murray initially had concerns about “using unfamiliar, home-grown software to accomplish tasks—like uploading files—when I typically would use a more conventional and efficient tool or process,” he wrote via e-mail. He has also thought of how data could be “wiped out pretty quickly by accident—but that can happen to virtually anything I do.”
Among some of his peers, he wrote, their reaction to assembling a digital dossier is “close to the primal fear of being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.” Such attitudes were behind a Faculty Senate resolution that persuaded administrators to wait until 2010-11 before making digital dossiers mandatory. On the other end of the scale, Mr. Murray wrote, the reaction was so positive that it could be “likened to the thrill and satisfaction of finding the exact change in your car’s cup holder as trucks queue behind you in the turnpike exit’s express lane.”
Still, it will be tough for institutions to completely strip paper from the tenure-and-promotion process. Mark G. McNamee, senior vice president and provost at Virginia Tech, says that faculty members in the engineering department already use digital dossiers, and that the entire university will require them this fall. But paper could hang on in nooks and crannies.
“Some departments at Virginia Tech might decide to keep the original letters that go with each application, or reviewers might still print out an executive summary,” says Mr. McNamee, who acknowledged that some people won’t want to read the entire application on a computer screen. “But still, we think this is a move in the right direction.”