IT Innovation Contest

A team-based contest for creative IT solutions

Accountability Tool for Tenured Faculty in the Graduate Division at UCSF

Submitted by Bethany Simmons on July 13, 2012 - 2:48pm Last revised by Web Producer on August 25, 2014 - 10:07am.
Proposal Status: 
Review Complete

Tenured faculty members in the Graduate Division at UCSF (biophysics, tetrad, etc.) run labs consisting of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. However, these tenured faculty members are not held to task in their mentoring responsibilities and very talented students sometimes slip through the cracks. Faculty members are typically chosen by their ability to do great science and not on their ability to run functional well-balanced labs.

 

I am proposing to develop a web-based accountability tool that makes these lab bosses accountable for the well-being and successes (and failures) of their graduate students. This can be developed in conjuction with the establishment of a governing student body that maintains and monitors the accountability tool.

 

Some potential functions of the accountability tool:

- address immediate concerns of graduate students

- have resources for mentoring classes and workshops for faculty members

- have team-building exercises

 

Please email me at bethanymsimmons@gmail.com if you are interested in working on this project. Here is an example of an accountability tool: http://www.oneworldtrust.org/apro/.

 

Comments

Leslie Yuan - July 16, 2012 - 8:55am
Hi - Can you expand a bit more on you envision this tool would be used in practice? Wondering if its the graduate students or the faculty (or both) who would be the primary users of the tool. For example: 1. Would students write their concerns and would those concerns go back directly to the mentor or would the concerns be captured so that later, someone could go back, analyze and find a workshop that can help address a gap in skills for mentors? 2. Would this accountability tool be a resource for workshops and team building exercises that people come across, thereby becoming a repository for people looking for training? I went to the example you provided, but still wasn't quite sure of the exact functions that you are thinking about. thanks!

Enrique Terrazas - July 17, 2012 - 9:56am
I share Leslie's concerns and also wonder if an existing tool that is used in Graduate Medical Education, Evalue, could be used to provide some of the functionality in this proposal.

Anirvan Chatterjee - August 1, 2012 - 2:22pm
It might be useful to see if there any appropriate accountability tools built for an existing UCSF-supported platform, e.g. Salesforce.

Commenting is closed.