Activity Insight

Digital Measures - Activity Insight

Activity Insight (AI) is a web-based information management system designed to organize, store and report on faculty teaching, research and service activities. AI provides one place for a faculty member to keep information about his/her performance current.

Main Advantages for Faculty

First, AI eliminates the need to frequently ask you for details about your teaching, research and service accomplishments in order to prepare numerous reports required by accrediting agencies, the news media and various university offices. University administrators (e.g. Chairs, Program Directors, Deans, etc) will be able to use AI to produce many of these reports.

Second, AI allows you to easily manage information about your performance and with a simple click of your mouse to produce the following reports:

• Faculty Evaluation
• Rank and Tenure Application
• Vita

You can produce these reports as Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF or HTML documents.

The bottom line for everyone involved is AI will save time by reducing the burden of paperwork associated with reporting.

Completing the R&T Application Custom Report

The Faculty Evaluation and the Vita are completed by Activity Insight.  However, there are a few items in the R&T Application that we cannot use Activity Insight to complete. I list those items below:

• Section A Cover page (which is now completed in Workflow)
• Section B Table of Contents
• Item 1 in Section D Teaching
• Item 3 in Section D. Teaching
• Item 6 in Section D. Teaching
• Item 1 in Section E. Scholarship
• Item 5 in Section E. Scholarship
• Sections G through M

Also, there are notations required for each scholarly work, such as “VU”, “Dis”, “Last”, Invited by Editor, and an explanation of the significance of the scholarly work by referencing quality of journal, the journal impact factor, citation data, etc. Until recently we did not collect this information in Activity Insight so the custom report may not have all of it.

Here is how you should proceed to use the R&T Application custom report. Once you have entered information in Activity Insight, run the Rank and Tenure Application custom report and open it in Word. You then can add the missing sections, complete the items remaining, and add the notations and additional explanations required by R&T Guidelines.  You will convert this to PDF as part of your submission to the workflow system. We have a separate training on that.

Required Use

All faculty members are required to use AI.  We strongly encourage you to enter your entire curriculum vitae (CV).

Because AI is easy to use, once your CV is in AI, you are expected to keep your information in AI current.

In order to save you time, we have up-loaded information from Banner to complete 32 fields on four screens in AI.  Some of those fields are read-only, so if the information is incorrect, please email the correct information to Michael Risch,(risch@law.villanova.edu). To see a list of these 32 fields, click here.

Accessing AI

To access AI, log on to MyNOVA, and simply click on the Activity Insight link under Applications in the Links portal.  

Learning How to Use AI

For a basic introduction to using Activity Insight, please review the "Activity Insight Overview." Digital Measures also provides a guide, which is very helpful.  It explains how you can import data from your CV or from a citation service like Crossref, Web of Science, or even a bibTEX file. For tips on entering information, refer to “Where Do I Enter…?” This guide presents a sampling of items faculty will enter into Activity Insight. The guide is not meant to be a comprehensive list of items. We have focused on the items most likely to generate questions about their location in Activity Insight’s screens and fields.