Is It Time To Revamp Faculty Academic Portfolios?

Content originally published on data180.com. Learn more about Interfolio’s acquisition of Data180 here.

We ran across a topic from 2008 that still has relevance today for higher education. The discussion centered around the idea that institutions in higher education need to implement new and standardized academic portfolios to evaluate faculty performance. This was the conclusion reached by Peter Seldin and J. Elizabeth Miller in their book, entitled “The Academic Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Documenting Teaching, Research and Service.”

Miller and Seldin shared their perspective on the need for standardized academic portfolios in an interview with Inside Higher Ed upon the release of their book. They were concerned that traditional faculty records provide a list of activities and accomplishments, but fail to give proper context for evaluators or create opportunities for meaningful reflection by the faculty member.

“Evaluators do not inherently understand a professor’s teaching philosophy and methodology,” Seldin and Miller stated in the interview, “or the nature of their research/scholarship, the significance of their selected publications, the context of their work, their most noteworthy accomplishments, their role on institutional committees.”

“The best way to get at the individuality and complexity of faculty work is the academic portfolio,” they continued. And the authors statements supported the notion that structured reflection allows each faculty member to provide context, significance, and integration of teaching, research, and service to provide more clarity on the cohesive body of work.

In preparing “The Academic Portfolio,” Seldin and Miller interviewed more than 200 faculty members, department chairs and deans from various disciplines and institutions and asked for recommendations about the content of faculty portfolios. They used these suggestions to build a comprehensive portfolio template, which can be customized to meet the needs of specific faculty members or departments.

“The Academic Portfolio” presents this comprehensive template, as well as 18 examples of faculty portfolios from different disciplines.

Seldin and Miller believe their portfolio enhances the faculty performance evaluation process by promoting thoughtful review and producing concise documentation. “It is based on depthful reflection and provides the ‘why’ and the ‘how,’ not just the ‘what,’” they stated. And instead of submitting boxes filled with binders (which are unlikely to be read), faculty prepare a portfolio which is limited to 19 pages (typed) plus a tabbed appendix in which supportive evidence is housed.”
Seldin and Miller’s full interview in Inside Higher Ed is available here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/11/portfolio

Content originally published on data180.com. Learn more about Interfolio’s acquisition of Data180 here.

Fulfillment + Customer Support = Scholar Services!

When you think of mergers, what do you think of? You probably imagine two huge establishments making agreements over millions of dollars. The merge between the Fulfillment and Customer Support departments at Interfolio is slightly different.

In my current role, I’m a Scholar Advocate. Before the merge I worked as part of the Fulfillment team as an Intake Document Specialist. I quality checked all of our incoming documents, assisted in scanning copies of documents received via paper mail, and processed conversions (conversions are a packet of documents also known as a “credential file” that we receive from an institution’s career center).

Our Fulfillment team was great at processing the document and delivery commitments for scholars who submit applications through Interfolio. Our Customer Support team was great at listening to and resolving our customers’ issues when they are having problems with our product. However, there were many situations that called for actions from both teams in order to satisfy the customers’ needs. Coming together, we have created the Scholar Services department. Scholar Services now has the ability to perform all essential functions to provide our users with the best experience possible.

Throughout the past 5 months, former Customer Support Advocates and Fulfillment Specialists have stepped up to the plate as we started to undertake cross-training efforts between the two teams. Before the merge, a scholar’s electronic credential files were sent to me, which meant that only I could process and keep track of these documents. After the merge, we gained the ability to ensure that all team members are aware of users whose files have been sent, and the ability to have more than one member of the team work on these documents. It is a great feeling to know that you have extra hands to help out and more members of your team understanding the process it takes to get the job done. Each member of our team is now well-rounded and understands each function it takes to achieve a common goal. By merging, the team is now able to work through the amount of mail we receive and meet promised delivery times, and is also able to hear our scholars concerns by responding to emails, voicemails and phone calls. By combining the two teams we have avoided preventable glitches we occasionally saw when we were separated, and built stronger communication, which means a quicker response to users’ concerns.

By cross-training each member of our Scholar Services team, we have established a common level of knowledge and created a better flow of productivity and operations within our team. We now have a greater ability to listen to our users concerns, as well as to notice issues and fix them in a timely manner. Our team is now stronger than ever before!

New Feature: Auto-Attach Letters of Recommendation

If you’ve submitted an application through Interfolio’s ByCommittee—that is, you’ve sent materials to an institution receiving applications through Interfolio, rather than another system for job postings—you probably noticed that there are quite a few steps involved in attaching your recommendation letters to your application. Maybe more steps than you first realized. Prior to today, a letter could only be attached if the letter writer had already sent their letter to Interfolio. So as soon as a letter arrived, you, the applicant, would have to log back in to our site to add it to the application.

Our goal is to make your application process as easy as possible, so we wanted to eliminate this extra step. Now you can finish up your application and submit when you’re ready, without having to wait on anyone else. We’ve been working for the last few months on giving scholars the ability to automatically attach incoming letters to an application, even if that letter hasn’t arrived when the application is submitted. We’ve finished testing and are ready to share this improvement with you!

Here’s how it works: You can request a new recommendation directly from your application, as you’re working on it, and that letter will automatically be added when it arrives. After you request the letter, you can continue with the rest of your application. Or, if you’ve already requested a letter prior to starting your application and you would like it to be included in the application once it arrives, you can go ahead and add that “pending” letter to the application, and, once again, the letter will automatically be added to your application when it arrives.

It’s kind of like pre-ordering a new book online. Even though it’s not available yet, you can go ahead and request it, and we’ll automatically send it for you as soon as it arrives!

So now you’ll be able to submit your application through Interfolio and rest assured that your part is done as soon as you’ve clicked that “Submit” button—even if your letter of recommendation hasn’t arrived yet. If you’ve indicated that you would like your letter included once it arrives, it will automatically be attached even if your letter writer submits it after the application deadline. This lets you convey your intention to apply to the school and indicate that you will be sending your letters, and we’ll take it from there!

As always, if you’ve got any questions about the auto-attach feature, don’t hesitate to be in touch with our Customer Support team: Max, Ethan, Kat (me!), Prisca, or Jane at (877) 997-8807.

Email Deliveries and Their Discontents, Part II: A Solution

Before the New Year, we published Part I of this series, an effort to make Interfolio’s role in the job application process more transparent. That post explained how we track application deliveries and the steps we’re taking to prevent spam filters from causing delivery issues.

If you represent an institution that has experienced spam issues with Interfolio email deliveries, please contact Max, our Customer Support Manager, directly: max.swagler@interfolio.com

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Today’s post addresses the evolution of a fragmented job market and why we, like many of you, are discontented with the status quo. The way the job market functions is inefficient and hard on candidates. We want to be part of the solution.

When we opened our doors in 1999, paper was the medium of the academic job market. Most institutions required hard copies of dossiers, a requirement that was laborious but relatively straightforward. As technology became increasingly consumer-friendly, university HR departments embraced applicant tracking portals and services. Universities that did not have their own, school-specific online application systems began accepting applications via email.

With these technological advances, the application process actually became more fragmented. The job market no longer demanded that you send reams of paper around the country, but it did demand that candidates and their letter writers deliver confidential documents and letters to myriad idiosyncratic online systems and administrative email accounts.

Interfolio began fulfilling email and web applications because job seekers, looking for the closest thing to a one-stop dossier shop, requested those services.

While we labor tirelessly to fulfill applications by web, email, and (yes, still) paper, we firmly believe that candidates and committees would be better served by a standardized platform and process for submitting academic job materials. There are ways to make life on the job market easier, and one of them is to adopt a common application platform—no more poorly designed university HR portals—that takes the cost of hiring off the candidate. Bonus points for eradicating the use of paper, an unnecessary waste of natural resources given the technology we have available.

For all of these reasons, we built ByCommittee, a platform that manages online dossier submission and review. ByCommittee is subscription-based: institutions pay for the service, and then departments can tailor it to meet their search needs. With a ByCommittee application, candidates upload their documents and search committees view them. That’s it: standardized, streamlined, and free for academic job seekers, the people who need it most.

Our goal is to make ByCommittee the standard application system for the job market. We hope that you, the candidate, will never again have to pay to apply for an academic job.

In the meantime, as Interfolio works for change, we will continue to ensure delivery of your applications by all four methods, including email. Perhaps just as importantly, our Customer Support team will continue to advocate for you throughout the job market process.

Have opinions? Find us on Twitter: @Interfolio

Email Deliveries and Their Discontents, Part I

Transparency is in short supply when you’re on the academic job market. This series is part of our effort to make the application process more transparent for candidates. In this post, based on conversations with users and recent chatter on Twitter, we’d like to clarify how our email application deliveries work, explain how these deliveries occasionally fall short, and describe what we’re doing to prevent that problem.

There’s some confusion about where email deliveries fall within Interfolio’s spectrum of services, so let’s start there.

Interfolio delivers your dossier one of four ways:

Online Application Delivery Internally, we call these applications “webbies.” When we submit a webbie, we access a university-specific application portal on behalf of you, the academic job candidate, and your recommenders.
Paper Delivery You submit your dossier materials to us, often online, and we mail hard copies of them to an institution.
Email Delivery We email your dossier materials, including your confidential letters of recommendation, to an institution.
ByCommittee Departments and institutions subscribe to ByCommittee. Candidates upload their materials to the platform, and search committees access and collaboratively review them. Nothing travels anywhere. These applications are always free for candidates.

The institution that is advertising for a new professor or postdoc or researcher determines the method—web, paper, email, or ByCommittee—by which Interfolio delivers your dossier.

So, how does Interfolio currently track email application deliveries?

We use a tool called Mandrill to monitor all outbound email communications. In the last 90 days, system emails had a deliverability rate of 99.6%.

What happened to the other 0.4%?

That 0.4% represents both hard bounces (the email address does not exist, the domain does not exist, the recipient’s email server is blocking delivery) and soft bounces (the recipient’s mailbox is full, the recipient’s email server is down or offline). We know that there are sometimes delivery issues with these packets, and we actively monitor and address those issues immediately.

Where do spam filters come in?

The majority of our email applications are delivered to institutions without any problems. A small number—less than 1%, according to our support requests—of email applications end up in spam folders. Spam filters, as anyone who sends and receives email knows, are silent; we don’t receive automated feedback about messages that end up marked as spam. We rely on users or institutions to notify us when an email delivery fails.

This of course is not ideal, and we are always iterating on our end to further limit the percentage of emails that get caught. In addition to our own settings, each Interfolio email delivery contains a verification link. We are reaching out to institutions to communicate the imperative of verifying receipt of email applications so that we can follow up on unverified deliveries.

If you represent an institution that has experienced spam issues with Interfolio email deliveries, please contact Max, our Customer Support Manager, directly: max.swagler@interfolio.com.

What is the quality control process for email application packets?

Interfolio’s Fulfillment Team verifies every email address before we OK it for sending. If we discover a typo or other mistake that prevents us from verifying the job search with which the address is associated, we do one of two things: correct the error ourselves if it’s obvious (i.e. a simple typo in the domain name), or notify the candidate and request a valid email address.

What does the Interfolio support team do when there’s an issue delivering email applications?

Our support team—Max, Ethan, Laurie, and Sydney—acts as a second layer of security for Interfolio members. We reach out to institutions when there’s a delivery problem. We expedite deliveries if you need them to go out before midnight for a last-minute deadline. We always re-send application materials free of charge if there is any delivery confusion. We work for you.

Interfolio support is here to help—we hope to make your application process a bit more transparent. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with feedback or additional questions.

Call our Support Team: toll-free (877) 997-8807

Pricing Change

After holding steady for five years, we are making a few changes to our delivery pricing structure. No one likes to hear about pricing changes, and we certainly don’t like talking about them. Unfortunately, while we haven’t changed since 2008, just about everything else has changed. Effective August 26th, 2013, a few of our delivery prices will change.

Let’s Start with the Good News

The first bit of good news: Your account fees won’t be changing. In fact, it’s easier than ever for you to get access to Interfolio. More institutions are using Interfolio’s ByCommittee, which provides free access to an Interfolio Dossier & Portfolio account upon applying to the opportunity.

The second bit of good news: Our most popular delivery methods won’t be changing at all. Applications to schools using our Interfolio ByCommittee product will remain free and applications sent via e-mail will hold steady at $6. We’ll also keep standard First-Class USPS and USPS Priority Mail deliveries at their current starting prices, $6 and $12 respectively.

For some context, here is what we’ve seen over the last year and a half, in terms of delivery percentages:

Deliveries sent to institutions using ByCommittee: 31.4%
Email deliveries: 25.2%
Online Application Deliveries: 23.9%
ALL Paper Delivery options: 19.4%

As you can see, we have a pretty serious trend towards electronic and away from paper, which is good for everyone. Electronic is faster, cheaper, and a whole lot easier for everyone involved!

What is Changing?

Again, many options will be staying put at their current prices. Here’s a rundown of the changes.

Online Application Delivery: $4 per delivery
USPS International Mail: $8
FedEx 2-Day Delivery: $21
FedEx Overnight Delivery: $33
FedEx Rush Overnight Delivery: $45
FedEx 2-3 Day International Delivery: $50

For any paper deliveries over 20 pages, we will charge an additional $2 per additional 20 pages for each delivery.

A Word on Webbies

The most significant change involves our Online Application Delivery method. Though it has become more and more popular the last couple of years, it remains our most misunderstood delivery option. For more information on how this unique delivery method (internally called “webbies” – short for “web delivery”) works, check out our recent blog post on the topic.

Long story short, many institutions have either developed or purchased software to help them manage their graduate admissions or faculty hiring processes on campus. Most of these applications have a mechanism in place for applicants to request confidential letters of recommendation from peers, mentors and faculty members.

Interfolio has developed a workaround for these systems, that allows the applicant to request that Interfolio fulfill the request with letters already in their Dossier account. An effective, but manual, labor-intensive workaround.

The Rest of the Story

Interfolio’s goal is to provide an incredible, user-centric experience for our users, allowing them to focus on the content of their applications rather than the process itself. We also want to do this as cheaply (for the applicant!) as possible. As we work with more institutions, and as everything moves to be electronic, you should see the costs associated with these applications continue to significantly drop.

At the same time we’ve added more flexibility via extended hours of our Fulfillment team and by extending our support coverage for an additional hour. We’ll continue doing everything that we can to add value to the Interfolio experience, without dramatically increasing the costs associated with being a user. As always, let us know if you have any concerns!

Online Application Deliveries: If Only We Had the ‘Easy’ Button

We want your Interfolio Dossier account to be a happy place, where you can manage everything in one, convenient place. Unfortunately, external factors sometimes conspire against us, and the rise of a seemingly countless variety of different online application systems in recent years has presented a particularly vexing problem. In many ways, online applications make life easier for both applicants and the institutions to which they’re applying. However, the process for submitting confidential letters of recommendation has actually gotten more complex in most systems.

Rather than simplifying the letter submission process, most systems instead place an even greater burden on both their applicants and those writing letters for them. Letter writers love Interfolio because we allow them to follow one consistent process, rather than needing to have them upload letters to a variety of different systems. So, despite some institutional roadblocks, we do our best to help you and your letter writers out.

If you’ve had us upload a letter of recommendation to an online application system in the past, you know that it’s, well, a process. With a little bit of duct tape and gum, we’ve developed a solution involving custom document e-mail addresses, a unique notification system, and a whole lot of human touch in order to accommodate as many of these upload requests as possible.

We began formally offering Online Application Delivery as a standard delivery option in November 2009. Since then, we’ve processed more than 200,000 individual letters of recommendation on behalf of our applicants and volume has only been rising. In 2012, we submitted almost 100,000 letters of recommendation to third party (a.k.a. not Interfolio) online application systems. More than 75% of those were processed in October, November and December, which averages out to 1,200 a (working) day!

So what do we actually do when we receive an Online Application Delivery request? Why is our delivery timeline for these requests so different than other electronic options, such as e-mail? What’s with the funky price? Grab a chair and your beverage of choice.

Since every application is different (different provider, different questions, different requirements, etc…), it really does vary, not just by institution, not just by department, but by individual program or position. Here’s a general visualization of what we typically do, on top of our standard quality control processes that ensure the right documents go to the right places for the right applicants.

And that’s just for one letter of recommendation. Since most applications require multiple letters, we typically rinse and repeat for each document that needs to be uploaded to a particular application. Compare that to our other delivery options, where we verify the destination, and quality check the documents before sending them on their merry way.

In fulfilling these types of requests, we need to make sure that we aren’t violating FERPA (we can’t upload a confidential letter to a system that makes the letter available to the applicant), we aren’t misrepresenting our role in this process as a proxy for the recommender, and we aren’t supplying information that we are not legally or ethically able to provide (basically, answers to any subjective questions).

What are some other roadblocks?

Broken links in the requests we receive from applications
Third-party application site is down (happened during Hurricane Sandy)
File type limitations
Character limitations for systems that require the letter to be composed in a text box
Long upload times – we’ve had scenarios where uploads have taken hours, even overnight, around deadline time

Despite all of that complexity, we are actually able to fill an overwhelming majority of the requests that we receive. In cases where we can’t upload via the system’s preferred process, our Support Team will always try to find another way to submit those letters, if at all possible. However, there are situations when we just can’t upload.

We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. It’s not ideal for you, and it’s not ideal for us. In the meantime, we’ll keep doing what we can to get your letters to where they need to be. It’s not quite “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” but we’d like to think it’s close.

Affiliation, we hardly knew ye

We’re excited to be pushing out new versions of our Dossier and Letter Writer accounts on Sunday, June 9th. Based on a combination of our own research and direct user feedback, both products will be revamped to ensure a better, more streamlined user experience for each audience. All existing functionality that users already love about Interfolio will remain the same. Dossier users will still be collecting, storing, and delivering application materials. Letter Writer users will still have one central place to upload and manage their letters.

One change that will be part of the release of the new Dossier is how individual users affiliate themselves with an Interfolio partner institution when signing up for an account. In the past, we’ve had the individual user make this selection at signup, without providing a lot of context for the ramifications this has for their account.

This was alternatively confusing, unclear, or nonsensical, depending on what information, if any, the (potential) user came armed with when hitting the registration page. Beyond not doing the best job of communicating what affiliation meant to you as a new user, we also made it a “required” field. Required in that you needed to put something there, but “No School Affiliation” and “My School is Not Listed” were acceptable options.

To clarify the process for all of our users, we’ll be removing this selection from the registration workflow. This change will not impact the affiliations associated with any existing Interfolio accounts. For users that are not at all associated with a university career center or academic department partnered with Interfolio to provide the Dossier service to their students or alumni, this should be a welcome, clarifying change.

However, many users are associated with one of our Dossier partners, and will need to have their account affiliated with an institution. There are two primary ways to have your account automatically associated with the proper institution:

Signing up with a unique registration link that is provided by your institution.
Signing up using a special offer code that your institution or department has set up to subsidize some or all of the costs of using Interfolio.

That link or code, depending on the partnership that your career center or department has with Interfolio, can be provided by the person administering Interfolio at your institution.

Of course, if all else fails, just get in touch with our support folks and they’re happy to help you add the appropriate affiliation to your existing account!

Sneak Preview of Our New Letter Writer Interface

There have been a lot of exciting changes at Interfolio in the past few months, all in the service of our commitment to providing you with an easy way to submit confidential letters of recommendation for your students and colleagues. We know one of your favorite features of Letter Writer is the cost (FREE) and don’t worry, we haven’t changed a thing on that front! But just because Letter Writer is free doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve some user experience love! After June 9th, when the new version will be made live, all of our beloved letter writers will benefit from a new, clean interface and more efficient ways to complete your tasks.

Although we still require an email address and password to submit a letter (after all, we need some way to keep your letters safe, secure, and always owned by you, the writer), those of you who are new to our Letter Writer product will find a streamlined account creation experience that’s more efficient and easier to understand.

We only require a little bit of information to get started.

Once logged in to the Letter Writer product, you’ll see clear displays of any and all pending letter requests. These requests will also include better displays of critical information, such as the due date or whether a signature is required. This comprehensive information is also found in your recommendation history, where you can also perform actions on recommendations already submitted, such as downloading the original document and replacing a letter if necessary.

View all the recommendations you’ve written.

But our changes didn’t stop with aesthetics. We heard loud and clear that although “less is more” in terms of our interface design, the letter requests themselves would benefit from more information from the candidates. Context matters and it results in better letters. We’ve responded to this issue by making changes to the recommendation letter request process in the Dossier product, which you can see in our new Dossier sneak preview. We now prompt your students and colleagues to include the information that letter writers find most useful when writing letters of recommendation. Those initiating letter requests have the opportunity to attach their CV and/or cover letter, to link you to the opportunity they are applying for and to leave you a personal message. We’re hoping that this additional information makes it easier for you to fulfill any requests for letters that you receive.

Sometimes, writers are reluctant to call us if they need help. We know you like your questions answered quickly and efficiently, so we have embedded help content throughout the Letter Writer interface to answer your most frequently asked questions.

Of course if our embedded help doesn’t do the trick, once the new product rolls out (check back after June 9th!), our help documentation will include up-to-date instructions and screenshots to ensure that you get the answers you need. As always, our Customer Support Team will be standing by to answer your questions and listen to any concerns you might have.

Help appears where you need it.

We think these enhancements will provide everyone with an easier path to uploading letters moving forward. As always, we want you to spend as little time as possible navigating our system, so that you are freed up to focus your time and energy on everything else—including writing great letters!

Sneak Preview of Our New Dossier Interface

Whether you are applying to schools, preparing for the job market, or organizing your materials for the promotion and tenure process, you want a secure, easy to use service that allows you to manage your documents all in one place.

A “less is more” design means efficient task completion.

We know from our conversations with many of you that you specifically choose to use Interfolio because we provide you with the ability to do all of those things, as well as request letters of recommendation and create a public portfolio to share your work with the world.

Your specific needs challenged us to redesign our Dossier product to give it a simple, clean interface and—most importantly—make it easier for you to take action with your documents.

Calls to action became the primary focus of our redesign, and our user testing indicates that adding documents to your Dossier, requesting letters of recommendation, and creating new deliveries will get a lot easier for you after June 9th when the new version will be made live.

As you probably know, requesting letters of recommendation saves your letter writers from having to manage multiple letters and from manually uploading letters into numerous confusing application systems.

At the same time, your letter writers have told us they wish you could include more information with your requests for letters from them. The new version of our Dossier product allows you to provide their desired information with your letter request; you will be able to add a personal message, provide them with a link to program or job information, attach your CV and cover letter or writing sample, indicate whether or not a signature is required, and (finally) let them know if you are operating under a deadline by providing a “due date”.

Provide information to letter writers when making a request.

Delivering your documents safely and securely to the right place is easily one of the most important things we do for you. Our new design streamlines the delivery process regardless of delivery method, taking you step by step through the process, so you are confident your materials are on their way to the destination you have indicated.

Moving through the delivery steps is a breeze.

From the time you enter a paper or email delivery address, through adding documents, confirming delivery details, and (finally) checking out and seeing that success notification, we’ve built in help along the way.

If you are applying to a ByCommittee position, or a position for which we already have all of the delivery data stored for you (such as everything in the MLA Job Information List), you can skip right ahead to completing any specific application forms and submitted required documents.

Confirm your application details before delivery.

Supporting you and your academic pursuits continues to be our primary goal and that should shine through with the redesign of our Dossier product.

We have embedded help text throughout the new version of the product, so you get answers to your questions and tips on how to get the most out of Dossier when you’re right there in it.