UPA Home > Faculty Activity

About MOCA

What are we doing?

  1. Beginning to build a unified view of faculty activity using data from multiple sources.
  2. The first step is to satisfy the Delaware Measure of Out-of-Classroom Activity (MOCA).
  3. Eventually a broad set of online data sources will be available and utilized.

Why do this?

  1. To use data to show the high quality, status, and dedication of our faculty.
  2. So we can use this data to show our faculty work very hard and compare extremely well with peer institutions.
  3. We’re required to participate by UNC-GA.

What is required this year?

  1. Activities taking place in the current year must be reported. Note that disciplinary differences result in multiple reporting periods of either fiscal, academic, or calendar year. As long as a discipline is consistent from year to year, the different time periods are not a problem.
  2. Data will be collected and summarized after summer 2009 and submitted to Delaware in December 2009.
  3. The current plan is to make a cutoff at the end of September 2009 for entering the activities from the 2008-09 time span. UPA will extract and review the data for approximately 2 months to get it ready for turning in to Delaware. The plan would be that individuals could still update the 2008-09 data in the system if the review process found reasons for change.

What is reported to Delaware?

  1. Counts of activities in 42 measures by all of the faculty in a discipline.
  2. Activity in approximately 75 departments (administrative units) will be mapped to reporting disciplines.
  3. Individual or personally identifiable information is not reported to Delaware.

Who participates?

  1. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are required by Delaware.
  2. The NCSU task force implementing this study recommends off-track faculty with FTE of 0.75 or more participate, and college and department administrators participate.
  3. Field faculty are excluded.

What effort is required from faculty?

  1. Each faculty member must track measures not maintained in any existing computer system.  There is a web collection application for data entry of the information.
  2. Some data measures will be collected from existing data sources in central offices so no effort will be needed for those data elements.  This list includes courses, undergraduate advisees, graduate committees, research proposals and awards (counts and dollars), patents, and parts of other measures.
  3. Some colleges have publications and/or other items currently loaded into a database that can be used to load central systems or create the counts for this project. Currently College of Management uses the Digital Measures system to hold many data items we need to count for MOCA. UPA will work with any colleges or departments where data already exists for any of the measures and import data from their existing databases.

What effort is required for Department heads and/or college Dean’s Office?

  1. Be an advocate for the process and identify improvements that are possible. Suggestions for improvement are welcomed.
  2. Disseminate plans, details, and requirements to faculty.
  3. Work with the task force to align core faculty activity reporting requirements across colleges and departments.  The goal is to produce a core group of information items that can be “downloaded” from the central systems for faculty in all colleges and departments in the same process and format. Of course the collection process has to be established before the extraction will work, so this will be tackled as a second phase of the current MOCA project.

Updated April 6, 2009