Purdue Elements - FAQ

Elements is a faculty activity reporting system. In May 2022, the Office of the Provost announced that Elements was selected as the new faculty activity reporting system. Elements will reduce manual data entry and allow faculty and leadership to collect and view information about their faculty’s activities, such as research awards, publications, presentations, and teaching innovations in one location.

Elements is a web-based software program. Users will access Elements via their Purdue login.

Elements will be used for annual performance review processes and internal reporting and aggregating.

Any existing processes around annual performance reviews for the Office of the Provost will become electronic; cyclical reporting, review, or similar activities will no longer be a paper and pen experiences for faculty and administrators.

Elements incorporates internal data sources (e.g., Purdue’s human resource data regarding employment, internal tracking platforms related to grants, course scheduling platforms), self-entered data, and proprietary mechanisms to harvest open-source databases. In this way, Elements allows Purdue faculty to review pre-populated information and input activities to create a fuller, more holistic or inclusive, narrative of their complete professional or scholarly profile. Academic Analytics does not allow for the manual inputting or updating of professional and scholarly activities.

Elements is a mechanism by which internal processes related to annual performance reviews are as streamlined and efficient as possible. In contrast, Academic Analytics is not about improving the process by which faculty activities are reviewed. Academic Analytics combs national open-source areas of information related to journal articles, citations, books, conference proceedings, and awards to provide university and college leadership with peer institution benchmarking data related to broad areas of faculty activities, at the aggregate-level. In this way, Academic Analytics is, arguably, an ‘external facing’ solution that decision makers can refer to compare themselves to others, if applicable.

Digital Measures was utilized by only 4 of Purdue’s 13 colleges and schools. As of July 1, 2023 Digital Measures will be decommissioned.

During a Request for Purchase (RFP) process, a committee of faculty and staff evaluated Digital Measures along with other IT solutions. The RFP team evaluated all finalists against a set of parameters, and Elements was chosen as the best solution for the university-level. Elements is only being implemented at the Purdue, West Lafayette campus.

A committee comprised of faculty and staff from the following areas reviewed several IT solutions during the Request for Purchase (RFP) process:

• Faculty Representation:
  • College of Education
  • College of Health and Human Sciences
  • College of Liberal Arts
  • College of Pharmacy

• Staff Representation:
  • College of Agriculture
  • Libraries and School of Information Studies
  • Purdue Information Technology

Additionally, finalists’ presentations were recorded and available to the larger campus community. Faculty specifically were invited to review the recordings and provide feedback via a Qualtrics form. Over 100 faculty participated in the review process, and Elements was determined to be the best option for all of Purdue University, West Lafayette.

Yes, if you are a faculty member in a college that had previously utilized Digital Measures, as of January 31, 2024, most data was migrated into Elements.

Several data sources will be automatically fed into Elements including:

• Sponsored research - custom data feeds for grants.
• Banner - teaching activity.
• Watermark - course evaluations.
• Human resources- employee classification to populate user profiles and to allow access for logging into the platform.
• Harvested publications data – from bibliographic databases such as Web of Science, SCOPUS, CiNii EN/CiNii JP, SSRN, and more.
• Digital Measures - for colleges who historically used Digital Measures, most data for grants, publications, teaching and mentoring, and professional activities will be imported into Elements, except data without a business need.

The College Success Managers (CSMs) were granted access to Elements in October 2023.

Faculty and staff were granted log in access to Elements in January 2024. Access to log into the platform is granted to the following employee class groups: Executive, M/P Professional, Professional, Faculty, M/P Management, Clinical/Research, Lecturers (Continuing, Senior or similar) and Support.

If you have tried to log in to Elements, but cannot and you believe that you require access to utilize this platform, please email idata@purdue.edu.

Elements will benefit individual faculty, the departments they belong to, college administrators, and the university by optimizing annual performance reviews. There will be reasons for every faculty member to input activities.

With this university-level solution, data when summarized at the college level will provide a more inclusive or holistic picture of faculty contributions to their discipline, department, college, university, and society. Additionally, faculty can better demonstrate their accomplishments for their discipline, field of study, impact in the market or across communities, and nationally recognized work including scholarship, grants, rewards or recognitions.

Elements will be more inclusive than other IT knowledge management solutions currently on the market, and it will paint the broadest picture possible of scholarly or creative activities and accomplishments including:

• Teaching and learning
• Service and engagement
• Research and creative activities

Faculty will need to regularly review data that is imported into Elements (at least once per year or more in accordance with review timelines for their unit). Faculty will have the ability to accept or reject harvested web-scraped information. Data can also be manually entered. Anything deemed important for annual performance reviews will need to be included in the faculty’s profile.

• Phase 1
  • August 2023 - Data Import
  • September 2023 - Testing
  • October-November 2023 - College Success Managers training
  • December 2023 - Soft launch
  • January through July 2024 - Most users enter the system
• Phase 2 began at the end of February 2024 and will continue through June 30, 2025. During this phase we will work to implement the following modules:
  • Activities & Outputs module: Ensuring all faculty that go through an annual review process inputting their contributions, accomplishments, performances, pursuits, etc. Across the areas of: Scholarly & Creative Works, Grants, Service, and Learning & Teaching.
  • Appraisal Module: We will be implementing the process that is the annual performance review of all faculty at Purdue.
  • Impact Module: Allowing faculty to link their accomplishments to external examples, documents, and other items that can help to showcase or demonstrate their impact (on their field or discipline, on/in society, in the private or public sectors, etc.).
  • Discover Module: Surfacing profiles that demonstrate the expertise, impact, leadership, collaboration, and more of our faculty at Purdue. It will group work across different categories (i.e., Fields of Research) to showcase the full scope of our faculty expertise and contributions. This information becomes searchable to people inside and outside of the Purdue organization (what appears on these profiles is under the control of the faculty, to some degree).

Each college has at least one College Success Manager (CSM) whose role includes training and supporting users in their college. View the College Success Managers page to find the CSM for your college.

Briefly, they are typically a staff member (M/P Professional) and they are supporting faculty, in their tenure and/or disciplinary homes, with utilizing Elements. CSMs should be an expert on the culture that is faculty affairs in your college, school or department. For more information about the role of CSMs across Purdue, please review the CSM Job Description.

Institutional Data Analytics + Assessment (IDA+A) oversees all aspects of centrally managing access to and usage of this solution at Purdue. IDA+A does this with ongoing support from our colleagues in Purdue IT, every college, and many others.