Less busywork, more reflection

How Eckerd College automated manual data entry in its  annual Faculty Activity Statement so every review starts from facts already on file, not a blank form.

Introduction

Eckerd College runs an annual Faculty Activity Statement organized around the categories its committees care about: teaching, mentoring, professional productivity, and service. The hardest part of any annual review is not necessarily writing it, but assembling it. The information one statement needs is scattered across systems that were never built to talk to each other. 

→ What a faculty member taught, and when, sits in the registrar’s course records. 

→ Their student course evaluations live in a separate assessment tool. 

→ Their appointment, rank, and title are held in a personnel system. 

→ And everything else…publications, grants, mentoring, and service, lives in the faculty member’s own CV, other systems, files, and inboxes. 

Collecting all of it, in the right format, every single year, by an important deadline is work that normally falls on people to do by hand. Eckerd took a different path, integrating those sources directly into Scholarly so the statement builds itself and faculty have more time to spend on reflective components.

A statement that arrives already populated

At the center of the system is each faculty member’s profile, which Scholarly treats as a living record rather than a form that sits untouched until review season. Connected institutional systems keep that profile current automatically, so it reflects each person’s appointment, rank, title, and teaching without anyone re-entering the information by hand.

When the annual review opens, the Activity Statement builds straight from that profile. Instead of a blank form, each faculty member starts from a statement already filled in with the facts on file, organized into Eckerd’s own categories of teaching, mentoring, professional productivity, and service. Their time goes to the parts only they can provide, the reflection and the narrative, rather than re-keying a course list or a title change the system already has.

Integrations that keep the data current on their own

The work that happens automatically is the data syncing, not the reviewing. People still run every review; what they no longer do is move information between systems by hand. Two standing integrations keep each profile current every cycle:

• Live Banner personnel sync. Appointments, ranks, and titles flow directly from Banner, including future-dated title changes that take effect at the start of the academic year, so the roster and promotions stay current.

• Automated course-evaluation ingestion. Course-evaluations attach to the matching Banner course record on each faculty member’s profile. It is the right document on the right course, ready for reviewers, not a bulk dump into a folder.

Manually replicating that mapping each term is exactly the kind of work a homegrown process or a static reporting database leaves to staff.

A live cycle across the whole faculty

The Activity Statement runs across all of Eckerd on a single schedule. The 2025-26 cycle opened with one shared submission deadline, so all faculty moved through the same process on the same timeline instead of a patchwork of formats and due dates. And because each statement arrives pre-filled from the profile, faculty spend the cycle reflecting on their work rather than reconstructing it, while the office spends it supporting the review rather than chasing down missing data.

The takeaway

Storing a CV is easy, and most systems do it. Eckerd’s advantage with Scholarly is that the review starts with data that is already in the system and correct: current appointments and ranks, and the right course evaluations, in place before anyone opens a form. Scholarly’s AI CV import tools expedite any additional ingestion required from faculty CVs. Faculty check their record instead of rebuilding it, because the tedious work of gathering and matching the data has already happened. That is the part a generic reporting database or a homegrown build leaves to people.

About Scholarly

Scholarly is a modern faculty information system that centralizes faculty data and streamlines the manual work that buries administrators and faculty, so your team spends less time wrangling documents and spreadsheets and more time supporting faculty. Book a demo or reach out to sales@scholarlysoftware.com to learn more