Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR)

When entering activities in FAR, it is important to manually save your data because there is no autosave feature. If you navigate away or your session times out, any unsaved data will be lost, and there is no way to recover it. To avoid losing your work, save each activity as you go. 

FAR sessions are timed for 60 minutes. After 50 minutes of inactivity, you will receive a warning message. If no action is taken to reset the timer, you will be automatically signed out at the 60-minute mark even though the page may still appear active. 

Additionally, FAR does not store a history of edits or allow for the restoration of deleted data, so be cautious and make it a habit to regularly save your work during your session. 

You can update your Profile and Activities as much as you would like in FAR. In fact, we recommend it! If you keep it up to date throughout the year, it will save you time when you have to submit your reports at the end of the year. It will also better ensure that you don’t forget to include something! 

Please note that report narratives for your annual activity reports are only available to add and edit during the established input period at the end of every year. You will be able to view reports that you have completed in FAR in previous years at any time.

For the same reasons that we recommend updating your Profile and Activities throughout the year, we especially suggest that you add, review, and update end dates for your activities. When you are no longer involved in an activity, please make sure to update it accordingly in FAR. Not doing so can create problems during the activity reporting process. 

In the old system (Faculty Success), if you made a change, it would be immediately reflected on your public page. With FAR, it will take one day for those updates to display. You will see the updates in your FAR account immediately; it is just the public site that will need time to update.  
 
Please note that items that must be changed in Workday might take longer than a day to appear in either place. See the Cannot edit certain items tab below for more details.

When you are adding a scholarly contribution that has co-authors internal to Bentley, make sure to include them by typing their name(s) in the Co-author box. This will create multiple versions of the entry – one for each co-author – that are “linked” on the administrative side to avoid duplication when reports are run. 

When other Bentley instructors add you as a co-author to a scholarly contribution,  a notification will appear in your Dashboard under To Do, allowing you to accept or reject the verification. If accepted, you can edit your copy of the activity without affecting the other co-author's copy. Rejections remain private with no notification sent to the requesting coauthor. Edits only affect your copy, and rejecting the activity won't notify the other co-author. Once an entry has been answered, the task will disappear and there will not be an opportunity to change your Accept/Reject response. More detailed information can be found here (begin reading at the Respond to a Coauthored Work Addition heading): How do I add and manage scholarly contribution activities?

Unfortunately, items cannot be moved directly from one activity area to another. If you put the information in the wrong section, you will need to manually re-enter the information in the correct activity area. Please read the section descriptions for more details, and if you are still unsure which section an activity should go, you may ask your department chair or associate dean for further clarification.

As you review, you will notice that some fields cannot be edited in Interfolio. These items are indicated by a padlock symbol, and this information comes from Workday. Therefore, these items need to be changed in Workday, not Interfolio. If you have more questions about what is locked and how to proceed if you need changes in Interfolio, you can review this instructional doc: Why I can’t I edit certain fields?

Many of you have lots of accomplishments. In each section, FAR only shows 20 entries at a time. Therefore, if you have a lot of entries in a particular section and can't find the FAR entry for something on your profile, make sure that you have actually looked at all your entries. You can do so in 2 ways:

1. In the dropdown menu in the top right of the section, switch the number of entries displayed. We recommend selecting 'All.'
2. At the bottom of each section on the right, there will be page numbers if you have multiple entries. Select each number to review all of your entries.

Note: this is most likely to occur in your Scholarly Contributions section.

When you're adding some Activities, you might see dates asked for twice. If you only update dates in one of these places, your citation might not reflect a date. Please make sure to add the dates in both places to ensure that all your information is displayed accurately.

Interfolio requires a date for every entry so 1964 is used as the default date if an entry doesn't have a year added. So please don’t panic if you see 1964 as a date for some of your Activities!

These most commonly happen in any Start Term column. Update these fields in FAR to the correct date. 

FAR has a great feature that was not in the previous system! You are able to decide if you would like things publicly displayed or not.

For each entry, you will see a Publicly Displayed setting, which you can mark as Yes/No. If you select No, the entry will not display on your public profile pages.

Please note: there are some areas where the entries will not appear publicly regardless of the option you’ve selected. One example is the report narratives that you will write at the end of every year.

As you complete the Profile and Activities areas, you might find that there are some required fields that weren’t in the old system (Faculty Success). If you want to make ANY changes to one of those areas, you must add the missing required information to save. It will not let you save your changes until everything is complete.

If you made recent updates in the previous system (Faculty Success) but you don’t see that information in FAR, it is likely that you made the changes after the final data transfer into FAR. Anything updated in FAR after the final data transfer would not have come over so the information will need to be updated again in FAR.

In the Scholarship: Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions section of Activities, all presentations’ statuses automatically were set to “In Progress."  Confirm that this Status column is correct and, where relevant, change their status to Completed. This may be true for other publication types as well.