Product Updates, January 2025
January was a busy month for the Scholarly team, with plenty of new features landing in the application. We iterate on the product in close collaboration with our customers, so almost all of what you see we built hand-in-hand with customers.
The product improvements in the month of January fell into a few major buckets:
New: AI Assistant
Scholarly gained a new friend this month, Assistant. This AI Assistant is able to securely query your institution's data to generate text, graphical, or tabular responses. Try asking it: "Generate a stacked bar chart of my faculty by rank over the last 10 academic years."
Improved Faculty Evaluations
We introduced a new question type in our faculty evaluations known as the "grid" question type.
We also introduced a signature question type, which allows for any workflow to have an e-signature. This is great for workflows where keeping a paper trail is important.
When enabled, a review step in a workflow can have a first draft generated by AI. This draft looks at any of the review material to compile its response. This will only generate a draft, and it's still up to the administrator or department chair to approve it.
Every faculty evaluation workflow now has a quantitative grid and charting view for all response information. The customer we developed this functionality with is using this to take a data-driven approach to their annual merit scores, checking for bias, and ensuring an equitable process.
Added a percent question type for collecting answers that require percent input.
Upgraded Experiences
Both users and faculty members can now have multiple email addresses. This helps multiple customers where faculty members have different emails for login vs. contacting purposes. In Scholarly, admins are able to highlight which email should be considered the primary email.
Faculty activities can now be bulk deleted. This can be useful for clearing out temporary or test data from an account.
CV Exports are now more resilient to failures and are less likely to error on export with exotic data.
Improve the handling of errors during the AI Paste experience.
Better Reporting
We now surface faculty activity grids, which contain the entire institution's activity data in an Excel-like format. Each activity is paired with names, departments, and other appointment data to enable flexible reporting.
