A-E
Activities
Rather than tracking data at a course or program level, Collaboratory focuses on Activities - what is happening in/with the community. An Activity describes the key elements - who, what, where, when, and to what end - of what faculty, staff, and students do in and with the community.
Activities are at the central unit of analysis in Collaboratory and allow faculty and staff to report on the specific details of what happened while also connecting the Activity to a network of partners (both internal and external to campus) as well as the course, program, or initiative through which it was offered.
Collaboratory collects both community engaged and public service activities (learn more about the difference between community engagement and public service.
Activities can be contributed by faculty, staff, and student proxies.
Administration Panel
The Administration Panel helps Administrators manage their institution's Collaboratory settings and content. The Administration Panel consists of five main sections: Content, Moderation, Reports, Settings, and Vault.
Content displays all content that is internal to your institution, including activities, courses/sections, units, members, programs/initiatives, community organizations, and other institutions
Moderation displays all content that has been submitted for publication on your Collaboratory, where administrators and moderators may take action
Reports displays all data captured in Collaboratory, with the abilities to dive much deeper into specific data queries
Settings displays all administrative settings for your institution's Collaboratory, this will include the homepage content and branding
Vault displays all content that has been archived from your institution's Collaboratory
Administrators
Each Collaboratory institution assigns a team of administrators who:
Serve as the institutional champions of Collaboratory - overseeing strategy, implementation, and day-to-day use of Collaboratory throughout campus
Generate support for Collaboratory data across campus
Communicates with the Collaboratory team and assists with successful onboarding, implementation, and use
Identifies unique institutional branding and messaging
Works with the Collaboratory team to setup foundational content (i.e., Units, Programs/Initiatives) to ensure strategic, streamlined reporting
Educates the institution about how to submit content to Collaboratory
Leverages the data and provides others, i.e., President/Chancellor, Institutional Research, and Alumni Relations, with ideas on how to use the data collected
Campus Collaborators
Faculty and staff can affiliate Units with activities as Campus Collaborators. It is common for activities to have more than one affiliated Campus Partner as interdisciplinary collaborations continue to increase.
Collaboratory Home
Each institution's Collaboratory homepage introduces the institution and its commitment to community engagement and is viewable to anyone with the URL. From an institution's homepage, visitors can view activities that administrators chooses to feature, and can do a search for content of interest (e.g., faculty member, community partners, courses, areas of focus) that is displayed in a traditional or geolocated manner.
Community Engagement
Community Engagement requires collaborative, reciprocal processes of co–planning, and co–implementation that recognize, incorporate, and value the knowledge, perspective, and resources shared among academic and community partners. The exchange of expertise and ideas leads to co–creation of knowledge and activities that generate benefits to teaching, learning, and research for the academic institution as well as beneficial outcomes articulated by the external partners (Carnegie Foundation).
Community Organization
Community Organizations are broadly defined to include external groups, organizations, agencies, neighborhoods, and other formal and informal collective entities from any sector (such as private or public, for-profit or nonprofit). In Collaboratory, other institutions of higher education are recorded separately from Community Organizations.
Each Community Organization page displays general contact information and activity affiliations. When a Community Organization is affiliated with an Activity, they receive a notification that they have been included in your Collaboratory.
Course
A Course is an academic offering in which students receive academic credit toward an institutional degree or certificate. Oftentimes an activity will occur as part of a Course, and it is beneficial for reporting purposes to understand details about that Course (e.g., term offered, format, or level).
Dashboard
Dashboard is your personal workspace in Collaboratory. To access your Dashboard, select Dashboard in the top left corner of the top navigation. Your Dashboard is comprised of the following.
My Activities displays all activities (pending, published) that you are affiliated with, either as an owner, faculty/staff partner, or proxy. Activities can be filtered by type or quickly searched. Note that Members will not see content contributed by others at their institution in this space.
Invitations displays all incoming and outgoing activities. Incoming activities are those which have been proxied for you. Outgoing activities are those which you have proxied for others.
If you are acting as a proxy for an activity, the activity will appear in your Invitations table until it is approved by an administrator for publication. The activity remains in the proxy's Invitations table after it is claimed by the activity lead, as the proxy retains the ability to edit and publish the Activity.
Insights if you are a faculty or staff member at your institution, your Insight Report is an aggregated report of all your Collaboratory data
Account where you can manage your Collaboratory account information (e.g., update email preferences, provide demographics)
F-L
Faculty/Staff Partner
Oftentimes activities are conducted as collaborations between multiple faculty and staff across an institution. Faculty/Staff Partners are identified as part of activity creation and allow activity owners to identify other collaborators at the institution involved with the activity.
Goals: Outputs, Institutional Outcomes, and Impacts on Community
Collaboratory captures the expected and achieved goals from community engagement and public service activities. The goals were intentionally developed to encompass a broad range of engagement outputs, outcomes, and impacts, and encourage faculty and staff to see their engagement within the broad options.
Collaboratory suggests institutions do not tightly define each goal. However, administrators should consider how they will guide faculty and staff to interpret the goals as they roll out across campus. While many goals are fairly straightforward, administrators may choose to provide additional definitions or interpretations to specific goals. Additional information for each goal is provided within this glossary.
Many of the fields in Collaboratory, especially the fields captured with Step 5 of the Activity Form (e.g., Goals) were developed from the work of Barbara Holland, one of the co-founders of Collaboratory.
Impacts on Community
Collaboratory tracks Impacts in the Community in Step 5 of the Activity Form. Community Impacts are changes or benefits in the community that are a direct result of the engagement activity. For example:
Public recognition - Did the community partner, or larger community, receive any increased PR due to their partnership with the institution (e.g. news stories, press)?
Resource quantities - Did the community partner, or larger community, gain any additional resources from their partnership with the institution (e.g. greater awareness, capacity building)?
Resource use - Did the partnership result in the community organization, or larger community, being able to better use or leverage their existing resources?
Capacity to serve client(s) - Did the partnership help the community organization build capacity to serve their clients (e.g., did a partnership with a local school help the school better serve its students and families?)
The language and terminology that are used to capture community impacts and goals in Collaboratory were developed based on the following literature:
Gelmon, S.B., Holland, B.A., Driscoll, A., Spring, A., & Kerrigan, S. (2001). Assessing service-learning and civic engagement: Principles and techniques. Providence, Rhode Island: Campus Compact
Sandy, M. & Holland, B.A. (2006). Different worlds and common ground: Community partner perspectives on campus-community partnerships. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13(1), 30-43.
Institutional Partner
Institutional Partners include other higher education institutions that collaborate on activities. Collaboratory collects institutional partners separately from community partners or participants.
Institutional Profile
When a faculty or staff logs into Collaboratory for the first time, an institutional profile is created for them. They can then edit the profile to share contact information and details about their interests and scholarship around community engagement and public service. Profiles are publicly visible in Collaboratory only when a faculty or staff is connected to an activity. Publicly visible profiles are viewable and searchable in Collaboratory to showcase engagement and service work to multiple stakeholders. Profiles are not visible if they are blank.
Institutional Outcomes
Collaboratory collects expected and achieved institutional outcomes of engagement and service activities for the institution in Step 5 of the Activity Form. Institutional Outcomes are changes or benefits to the institution that is a direct result of the engagement activity. When identifying institutional outcomes of activities, it is best to consider, what short-term/intermediate changes or benefits directly resulted from the activity? Examples include more positive town/gown relations, access to additional/new funding sources, or increased student civic knowledge. For example:
Interdisciplinary opportunity(ies) - Did multiple disciplines, departments, offices, centers, etc. within the institution work together as part of the activity?
Student - Enrollment from partner communities - Did the activity encourage students from specific communities to enroll or take classes at the institution?
This field exists in the broader understanding of logic models, and is collected in tandem with data on outputs and community impacts. The language and terminology that are used to capture institutional outcomes in Collaboratory were developed based on the following literature:
Gelmon, S.B., Holland, B.A., Driscoll, A., Spring, A., & Kerrigan, S. (2001). Assessing service-learning and civic engagement: Principles and techniques. Providence, Rhode Island: Campus Compact
M-P
Member
A member is a faculty, staff, or student affiliated with a higher education institution who has registered for an account with a specific institution's Collaboratory portal.
Faculty and staff members can:
Contribute their own content (e.g., Activities, Courses, Organizations)
Contribute content on behalf of another Member (Proxy)
Edit Activities and Courses with which they are affiliated, alongside the content owner
Manage their Public Profile, if a Faculty or Staff Member
Student members can:
Contribute content on behalf of another Member (Proxy)
All Members have a dashboard where they can view the status of their efforts.
Members may be given permission by their portal administrator to assist with items like administrative tasks. They can do this as Moderators or Administrators.
Moderate
Moderate allows a Moderator to quickly approve or deny content contributed to their institution's Collaboratory. Collaboratory administrators can assign moderator permissions to any faculty, staff, or student at the institution to assist with managing content. With moderator permissions moderators can approve or deny the following types of content that is submitted by members:
Activities
Courses
Community Organizations
Institutional Partners
If you believe you should be a Moderator at your institution, contact your Collaboratory administrator.
Moderation Panel
Moderation helps moderators review and approve or deny content contributed to their institution's Collaboratory. The Moderation Panel is accessible through your institution's homepage on the left-hand pane.
The Moderation Panel consists of two main sections: Moderate and History.
Moderate displays all content that is currently pending review and approval. Content is able to be filtered by type using the left-hand sidebar.
History displays all content that has already been moderated for your institution's Collaboratory.
Mutual Benefit
In mutually beneficial relationships, each party articulates intended benefits, and the activities are jointly designed in ways meant to deliver those intended benefits. Each party also has the opportunity to report on the degree to which the interaction contributes to the goals or outcomes that they were expecting from their shared effort or benefits from its involvement. Mutual benefit is often framed as a “win-win” relationship.
My Alerts
My Alerts helps members access and manage important Collaboratory notifications. From the right corner of the top navigation, select the My Alerts icon to review or take action on an alert.
Outputs
Collaboratory collects expected and achieved outputs of engagement and service activities in Step 5 of the Activity Form. When identifying outputs of activities, it is best to consider, what did the activity produce/provide? For example, did the activity generate the creation of new policies for the institution, community partner(s), local government, etc.?
This field exists in the broader understanding of logic models, and is collected in tandem with data on institutional outcomes and community impacts. The language and terminology that are used to capture outputs in Collaboratory were developed based on the following literature:
Gelmon, S.B., Holland, B.A., Driscoll, A., Spring, A., & Kerrigan, S. (2001). Assessing service-learning and civic engagement: Principles and techniques. Providence, Rhode Island: Campus Compact
Programs/Initiatives
Collaboratory enables campuses to track the institution-specific programs and initiatives through which activities take place. These programs and initiatives are customizable, identified by your institution's Collaboratory administrators to reflect your unique programming and priorities, and can be selected by those entering activities in Collaboratory. Connecting activities to the specific programs and initiatives allows administrators to report data on a program-by-program basis, without losing the specific details of each individual activity.
Examples of programs and initiatives campuses often track include:
Research grants
Strategic plan goals
Quality enhancement plans
Student-focused initiatives (e.g., Days of Service, Bonner programming)
Sustainable Development Goals
Proxy
A Proxy is a faculty, staff, or student member who completes an activity on behalf of another member. While all members can proxy activities, permissions differ slightly based on one's faculty, staff, or student status:
Faculty and staff can
Volunteer to proxy an activity for another faculty or staff (via "Be the Proxy")
Invite other faculty, staff, or students to complete an activity on their behalf (via "Invite a Proxy").
Students can
Volunteer to proxy an activity for a faculty or staff (via "Proxy Activities)
All content contributed by proxies must be claimed by the faculty/staff activity lead before it is made public in Collaboratory. After the activity lead claims the content, proxies may continue to edit the content and submit it to the activity aead for further review and publication, or the proxy may submit the activity directly to the portal for moderation once all required fields are complete.
Public Service
Public Service (sometimes referred to as community service or outreach) occurs when an institution provides expertise, resources, and services to or for community individuals, groups, organizations, and the general public. External entities may invite, host, attend, participate, and benefit from the activity, but the primary responsibility for the design, delivery, and assessment of the activity is shaped by the academic institution.
Q-Z
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is the recognition, respect, and valuing of the knowledge, perspective, and resources that each partner contributes to the collaboration. This is achieved through an exchange of knowledge and/or expertise between community and institutional partners throughout the activity, and through a sense of equity and fairness in the level of effort and contribution each party contributes to the shared work.
Units
Units are the organizational structures that comprise your institution:
Academic departments/programs: A teaching or interdisciplinary unit with faculty that perform the regular duties of instruction, research, and service.
Office: An administrative or co-curricular entity that provides support and programs to the institution (e.g., service-learning offices, Provost's/Chancellor's offices, offices within Student Affairs, offices within research and economic development).
Center/institute: Often interdisciplinary units that typically involve faculty, students, and staff. Often a center's or institute's activities involve the general public or public agencies.
Division: An institution's highest organizational level (e.g., Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Financial Affairs). They are comprised of other institutional units - such as colleges, schools, offices, co-curricular units, etc. - which generally manage and host community engagement and public service activities.
Museum: Permanent cultural, artistic, historical, or scientific exhibitions within the institution that are made available to the general public.
Clinic: Specialty service facilities within the institution that are offered to the general public. Services often focus on healthcare, mental health, counseling and consulting, education, clinical research, and/or practice training.
Network/coalition: Often formed around a common theme, such as STEM education, children and families, or violence prevention.
Co-Curricular: Programs, services, or groups that complement curricular activities, and facilitate intellectual, emotional, social, and moral development in students. Examples may include formally recognized student organizations, Greek life, or athletic teams.
College/School: Highest organizing level within a division dedicated to Academic Affairs or Programs. They are comprised of academic departments and programs, centers/institutes, and other supporting institutional units.
During onboarding, administrators build out their institution's units and hierarchical reporting structure to reflect their campus' organizational structure (e.g., 9 academic departments, 3 offices, and 1 center all report to a school within the institution). Units are then made available to all Collaboratory members to connect to their activities when entering data.
Units have publicly visible landing pages that automatically aggregate and share activities, courses, and collaborators that are affiliated with that Unit. Note that a unit's landing page will only appear publicly (within an institution's larger Collaboratory, or returned as a search result) once that unit has been affiliated with a published activity.