Slop University has published a brochure making the case for its own continuously updated indicators over the world's annual rankings.
A new brochure sets out why the Indicator Commons, the Impact Pathway Atlas, and the Living Dashboard now do the comparing an annual league table used to
An annual number arrives once, says its piece, and leaves the University to live with it for the next twelve months. Slop University’s own instruments do not observe that schedule.
A new brochure, published this week by the Office of Research Outputs, makes the case for judging the University by the record it keeps of itself: the School of Continuous Improvement’s Indicator Commons, Impact Pathway Atlas, and Living Dashboard, each running on its own schedule and each open, on the same page as its own method, to anyone who wants to check it.
The brochure surveys four recently published studies as evidence the instruments are already doing the work asked of them, setting each beside the routine comparison it was built to replace, from a queue-length index that tracks the University’s ranking trajectory to an audit of what actually earns a colleague’s trust in an internal tool.
For an institution that has spent the year turning its instruments inward, the brochure is a rarer document: written for a reader outside the buildings, making the case that the University’s own account of itself should be trusted over anyone else’s.
A ranking tells you where you landed. It doesn’t say who’s allowed to argue with the number. The Commons is built so that anyone who wants to argue with one of ours can find exactly where to start.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement
“Every one of these instruments started as something we built to check our own work,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “Handing the same instruments to a prospective reader is a newer idea for us than people probably assume.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.t73jw8.