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FAS - Faculty Accountability System
Background
Accountability requirements have become increasingly important over the last few years. UF/IFAS is required to justify the resources made available to the programs it conducts. Reporting requirements to Local, State and Federal governments have increased in frequency and complexity. In order to manage the growing volume of data and needed reports, UF/IFAS Administration directed the Office of Information Technologies and the Program Development and Evaluation Center to develop a system to collect and organize this information.Over the last year, the requirements for the Faculty Accountability System were established through extensive consultation and collaboration with Faculty and Administration. Their implementation resulted in the Faculty Accountability System. This system provides a standard interface for entering Faculty Achievements and Plans of Work into a centralized database. From this database, the required Accountability reporting is generated.
The advantages of such a system are primarily that information can be entered once, correlated with other databases (such as the Personnel or CRIS databases) and different views of this information can then be generated. For example, the conventional Faculty Accountability Report and the Plan of Work; over a period of years, faculty will be able to use this system to generate Tenure and Promotion reports. Similar reports can be generated to accommodate reporting requirements at different levels (local, state or federal). Furthermore, this system will greatly reduce the need to contact faculty and staff when ad-hoc reports are needed.
How Has It Been Used?
County faculty submitted their annual Report and Plan of Work using FAS. Center and department faculty are also expected to use FAS. To date, over 200 faculty have submitted their reports using the new system.
Where Can It Be Obtained?
The latest complete version of FAS can be downloaded from the IT Home Page.
What Problems Have Been Encountered?
- A bug was discovered in the system and corrected through a patch released in mid-November.
- Almost without exception problems were due to a lack of familiarity with Windows. From January 3 to January 14 the IT Help Desk logged 186 calls on FAS. 54% were related to using the software, 44% were installation issues and 2% were hardware issues. The average duration of each call was 34 minutes.
- Some counties have a firewall (a software barrier that controls traffic into the network for security purposes) that does not allow data to flow through. The problem has been resolved in some counties by working with the county IT staff. Where this was not possible instructions were provided on how to send the information through a modem or by sending the data files to UF/IFAS IT.
What Do I need To Run It?
FAS was designed to run on a P-200 with 64Mb of RAM. However, it's been running (sluggishly) on configurations as low as a P-133 with 24Mb of RAM.
Innovations is published by UF/IFAS Information Technologies.
Email us your questions, comments or praises!
Last modified January 14, 2000