Portfolios - Google form for Departments to allow faculty to upload portfolio materials

Google form for departments to allow faculty to upload Portfolio materials easily

We will add to this as needed (and as resources permit), but here are the instructions for how to easily copy a form for your faculty to use to submit their various porfolio elements in a simple way that:

• Makes it clear what faculty need to turn in by asking for their evaluation cycle year and full-time/adjunct status and then only asking for the specific elements they need to turn in

• Gives faculty links to the forms they need to fill out for everything

• Is fairly easy for you to access and send links to reviewers

• You can modify to meet the needs of your department (you can also contact us if you would like help modifying it to better meet your needs)

If you find parts of this unclear, please contact us; this Google form and/or these instructions may evolve in response to your feedback.

Important: These instructions are not meant for individual faculty to use; they are for departmental use only.

The person responsible for housing these files for the department should follow these steps (usually the Department Chair or departmental admin); these files can be moved elsewhere later (for archival), but it is recommended that they remain where they are uploaded until after evaluations to be certain that the links in the spreadsheet work properly. 

Get a copy using the template

1. Click here to access the template to copy to your Google drive

2. Click the  “Use template” button in the upper right corner

3. When it says “Missing File Upload folders”, click on “Restore” (far right)

This should put a Google form in your Google drive that you can edit (for example, you could delete the “Department” prompt or change it to a list to pick from). Also, please do not share the folder with the form in it so that "Anyone with the link" or "Austin Community College" have access; only share with the specific people who need to read the submitted forms and course materials.

Before using the form - setup and getting a link to send to faculty

1. If you would like to move your form to a different folder in your Google drive (it’s put in “My Drive” by default, so probably a good idea to put it in a new folder), open the form (it’s called “Portfolio uploads”), click on the triple-dot menu (upper right corner) and choose “Make a copy” and put it in a new folder (note that it cannot be on a Shared Drive, though).

2. Now, go to “Responses” (top middle tab in the form)

3. Click on “Link to Sheets”

4. Choose “Create a new spreadsheet” and click on “Create” (on the bottom right)

5. Go into the folder where your form lives and share the folder "Portfolio uploads (File responses)” with everyone who will need to view the files and forms (this can be done later, after everything gets submitted); uncheck “Notify people” - you will send them links to the files later from the Google sheet.

6. Go back to your form and click on the “Copy Responder's Link” button/hyperlink at the top of the page and then click on the “Copy” button. You can then paste this link into a webpage or an announcement for your faculty instructing them how to submit their portfolio materials.

Viewing the submissions

You can track who has submitted a form and when by going into the attached Google sheet (go to “Responses”, click on “Link to sheets” after you have followed the instructions above to create it). You can also either use the file links there to review the files or copy/paste the links in an email/Google doc to whoever will review them (after you have shared the folder noted above with them).

When it comes time to review the submissions, you might find it handy to sort your spreadsheet in different ways; to do that, click on the down arrow next to the name of the column column that you wish to sort and choose "Sort column". Useful sorts

• Which year in the 3 year faculty evaluation cycle are you in this year? - This will be very useful when you start reviewing things, since the different submissions are pretty spread out (due to including all combinations of faculty in the same form)

• Last name

• Time stamp

• Department (if you are collecting more than one)

As an example, we embedded this from the Google sheet for some "portfolios" we uploaded for testing (the files aren't filled in and we uploaded some junk files for the "course materials"); you can just copy the corresponding info for your faculty out of the sheet and paste it into something for your reviewers. All they have to do is click on the links (scroll to the far right in my example below; it depends on which year  was uploaded how far you have to scroll) to view the files, as long as they have access to your folder above. (For this example, we have it set so “anyone with the link” can view, but you wouldn’t want to do that…)

Note: The one downside to the way we set up the form is when it comes to uploading course materials. In order to simplify the form, we allowed faculty to upload multiple files at once for the course materials. However, that means your reviewers can't just click on the links like they can on the other files - they need to copy/paste the specific links out of the spreadsheet cell into the address bar in their browser. You could fix this by one of two methods: You could ask them to upload specific files into specific questions (i.e., one for syllabus, one for test 1, one for test 2, etc.) or you could require your faculty to combine everything into a single file to upload (and restrict it to one file for each course). Both of these methods have their own trade-offs as well, though.

Dean's offices

If you are in a Dean's office and would like to set something up as a central form that all of your departments could use the same form, please contact us and we can help you develop a customized version of this form. (This probably only makes sense if your departments are quite small.)

Quick note on security

Faculty do not need access to the folder in order to upload their forms (that's why we're using this method for upload). In fact, we strongly recommend that you do not have the Sharing settings for the folder "Portfolio uploads (File responses)” set to allow "Anyone with the link" or "Austin Community College" be checked under "General Access" (at the bottom of the Sharing panel). Set it so that only the people who need to read the files can access this folder, and if it's more than just the Department Chair and the departmental admin, we recommend you just email them the list of links from the spreadsheet rather than having them open the folder directly. (Uploaded files to have the faculty name appended to the filename, but it might be difficult to determine which files are which for each person.)

Some technical notes about the form settings

There are some configuration notes about this form that you should be aware of and/or might want to modify:

• If you would like the form "owner" to get an email notification every time someone submits a form, you should open the form, click on Responses, click on the triple-dot menu just to the right of View in Sheets, and then choose Get email notifications for new responses.

• The form is set to require ACC sign-in, collect email addresses, and send responders a copy of the response. We recommend you leave these as-is.

• The form is set to not allow editing but to allow people to submit more than one form, so if someone contacts you and says they made a mistake, just ask them to complete the form again (and you can go in later and delete earlier submissions). We haven't really tested what happens in a form that's this complicated if you choose a different year for your evaluation, for example, so this seemed safest.

• The form is set to allow only a single file be uploaded per person for most of the files with a maximum file size of 10 MB. You probably shouldn't change this unless you have a specific reason to do so. There is a 100 GB limit to the total files uploaded via the form, so you might need to "delete responses" and reset the form every year or so (after archiving what you want to keep). 

• For course materials, faculty can include up to 10 files per course (the maximum allowed); if you think your faculty will regularly need more (and that they can't combine some files), you might need to add some additional upload questions. We have also disallowed uploading video and audio files due to their file size (and the limits of Google forms); for those, we recommend that faculty simply upload a doc or pdf file with links to those files (in Panopto, for example).

• The Google username for each person will be added on to the end of whatever filename they use on their upload, so even if something happens to the link in the spreadsheet, you should be able to scan the filenames to find the submitter. (You can find the files inside the folder "Portfolio uploads (File responses)” and then look in the folder with the text of the question for the file you're looking for. This is why you should generally access the files from the links in the spreadsheet...)