The Preamble:
Every member of the teaching staff at a college or university in the state of Georgia needs to have an annual evaluation completed by their supervisor.
The Problem:
Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and its many schools were not at a 100% compliance with this rule. The office of the provost requested that the college come into compliance within the year as well as retroactively fulfill this obligation.
The Challenges:
The schools in Ivan Allen College employ many non-permanent teaching staff. This includes graduate students who teach classes, adjunct faculty, part time faculty, international faculty, and so on. Since the evaluations are due at the end of the calendar year, not the academic year, sometimes the faculty member is long gone before the evaluations are due.
The Solution:
A FileMaker database was created and published on the web. Each department’s administrator can query the database and find a list of faculty whose evaluations are due. Once the evaluations come in, the PDF can be uploaded and stored in the database and archived in case of a future audit. A new instance of the database is created every January, and the database is populated by pulling employment data once a week.