Product Updates, January 2025

Summary

Scholarly Software, Inc. has released significant product updates in January 2025, focusing on enhancing faculty evaluation workflows, reporting, and user experience. The highlight is the introduction of an AI Assistant that enables secure, institution-specific data queries, including generating charts and tables on demand. Faculty evaluation tools now feature new question types (grid, signature, percent), AI-generated draft reviews (with human oversight), and improved data visualization to support equitable, data-driven decision-making. Additional upgrades include support for multiple user email addresses, bulk deletion of faculty activities, and more resilient CV exports. These improvements reflect Scholarly's commitment to close customer collaboration, data security, and practical innovation in higher education administration.

What is the new AI Assistant in Scholarly? * The AI Assistant securely queries your institution's data to generate text, graphical, or tabular responses, such as creating faculty rank charts over the last decade.
How have faculty evaluations improved? * New question types (grid, signature, percent) and AI-generated draft reviews (requiring administrator approval) streamline workflows and support compliance and equity.
What reporting enhancements are available? * Faculty activity grids now provide comprehensive, Excel-like views of institutional data, enabling flexible, in-depth reporting with department and appointment context.
How does Scholarly handle user and faculty email addresses? * Users and faculty can have multiple email addresses, with administrators designating a primary email for communication or login purposes.
What other user experience improvements were made? * Bulk deletion of faculty activities, more robust CV exports, and improved error handling during AI Paste are now available.

Scholarly emphasizes that all AI features operate with "humans in the loop" and prioritize data security, aligning with their responsible innovation ethos. The January 2025 updates were developed in close partnership with customers, ensuring practical solutions for real-world academic administration challenges.

Ready to unlock the power of your data and automate your workflows? Book a demo with Scholarly to see these new features in action.

Jan 31, 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.