Professors and lecturers subjected to tests
Professors and lecturers subjected to tests
Wollongong University revealed this week that it has been using Cognos' business intelligence solution to increase its competition over other Universities and is planning to use it to analyse the performances of lecturers and professors.
The University assigned one of its graduate trainees in 2000 to implement and develop Cognos' business intelligence tool ReportNet in departments, such as finance and human resources, to create reports about the recruitment of staff, students, activity based costings and many other areas of research.
Chris Grange, the director of personnel and financial services at the University, explained how the institution has made the best use out of Report Net: "The system helps us to analyse the demand for students in different faculties, and divide that up into categories, in terms of High School students, matured aged people and international students.
"We are able to see that a lot of students apply for one particular faculty, whilst other faculties are left under-termed. Sometimes we don't know how many students we will get on a particular course until they have decided whether they want to go to our University or a different one.
"So the system helps us to juggle the information about the students and faculties, so that we know how much money needs to be allocated to each area. It keeps an up to date record for us so that we are aware of which departments need more resources, or which departments can have resources taken away and re-allocated elsewhere."
He said that the Metrics Manager element of ReportNet has provided the University with invaluable research that can be pulled together in a central point to assist with planning that can make the University increased its standards of performance.
"This is about academic performance management. This is about forming a view and simplifying information from all kinds of different sources about how well we are going academically. The faculty of Science can be compared to the faculty of Commerce in terms of research outputs. Our next big thing is to use it to look at the performance output of professors compared to lecturers.
"Pulling all of that information together in the one place will give us something nobody else has ever done before in any University in the world. I think it's going to be important and controversial but it is going to give us a competitive advantage."
Grange believes that using information in this way to analyse professors and lecturers will create a much fairer method of assessing their talents and value within the University.
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