How to Review and Contribute to a Submission for Committee Steps

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For Workflow steps with a committee role group, both committee chairs and committee members can see the materials submitted by all prior participants based on how the Workflow Administrator configured the form's security. 

Aside from this, the end user experience differs between the committee chairs and committee members. More information on how both users' experience differs is detailed in this article. 

Committee Member Experience

Email Notifications:

Based on the Workflow's Schedule configuration that was set up by the Workflow Administrator, committee members may receive reminder emails to notify them of approaching deadlines.

Committee members will stop receiving email notifications about a submission once they mark the submission as reviewed or publish a written response for review by the chair or committee. Please see below for more details on these steps.

Sections of the Submission

All committee members are presented with a read-only view of the faculty submission and the content submitted through any other prior review steps to which they have visibility.

All committee members also have a read-only view of the Chair Form, and any draft content the chair has saved, under the heading “This Committee's Response”.

Committee members would enter the material requested by them in the section "My Response". 

If the “Enable Member Visibility” option is set to “yes” by the Workflow Administrator for the committee step, committee members will see the section "My Response" change to "Committee Members and Responses" after publishing their response. This section will allow the committee member to view other committee members published responses by switching between the two tabs By Member and By Response: 

• The By Member tab shows committee member’s full response individually. 
  
  
• The By Response tab shows responses aggregated by field on the Member Form. 
  

If Member Visibility is disabled, the Committee Member will only be able to view their own published response under the section "My Response", and their published response will only be visible to the committee chair.

Options for Actions

Committee Members will have two options in their Actions menu: they can save their progress to finish later by selecting "Save Draft", or they can submit their response to the committee by selecting "Publish My Response to Committee".  

If the Workflow Administrator did not include any action type fields in the Member Form, the Committee Member would only be able to mark that they reviewed the submission once it reached their step by selecting "Mark as Reviewed for Committee" within the Actions menu, as shown below.

Committee Chair Experience

Email Notifications:

Committee chairs will receive reminder emails to notify them of approaching deadlines if they are configured for the committee step in the Schedule used for the given process. However, only chairs will continue to receive any email notifications configured until they complete the committee step by submitting the formal committee response and send the submission to the next step in the process.

Sections of the Submission

When committee chairs access faculty submissions for review, they will first see a read-only view of the materials submitted by previous participants based on how the Workflow Administrator configured the form's security. 

The section “Committee Members and Responses”, presents a list of committee members, along with an indication of which committee members have reviewed the submission, and when they last reviewed.

If the committee step has a Member Form in place so that committee members can share their reflections digitally while the step is pending, the chair will see any responses published by committee members in this section. The chair can review the submitted responses just as other committee members can, using the By Member and By Response views, and can share his or her own personal response to committee through his or her own Member Form (available through their personal row in the Committee Members and Responses section), but the chair is not required to submit a personal response in order to view the responses of other committee members.

The last section the committee member sees is the Chair Form, under the header “This Committee’s Response”. Through this section the chair will draft the committee’s formal response to the submission. A committee chair can save a draft of “This Committee’s Response” to make it available for committee members to see from their view. Once the response is finalized, the chair can submit the response to the next step.

Options for Actions

The committee chair can also save their progress by selecting "Save Draft" or publish their response to the committee by selecting "Publish My Response to Committee" if they wish.

Should revisions be required prior to the committee starting their review, the committee chair has the option within the Actions menu to send back the submission to the previous step, and once the committee is ready to complete their review, the chair can select to submit the submission to the next step.

Downloading a Submission to Review Outside of the Workflow Module 

Because of the sensitive nature of review materials, some institutions may not allow reviewers to download, print or modify any of the attached custom reports or form responses of previous process participants. If offline viewing is authorized by your institution, you can utilize the download option in order to review materials offline, outside of the Workflow module itself.

When enabled, the export option appears in various places:

• When viewing a submission via the Inbox
• When viewing a submission via the History table
• Via the "Actions" column in the History table

When this feature is enabled, reviewers will have a "download" button available.

Selecting the download button will open a follow-up prompt to choose a download option.

Download submission for online viewing:

• An HTML file that replicates how a user would see the submission via the user interface
• Access to uploaded documents will require login to view or download.

Download submission with files to my computer:

• An HTML file that replicates how a user would see the submission via the user interface
• A sub-folder for each step that contains reports or file attachments, with those files contained within the sub-folder

If a committee member downloads a submission for offline access while the committee step is still active (i.e., via the Inbox), and a Member Form is configured, the committee member’s download will include any responses they can see that were published through that Member Form for the given submission. This ensures that downloads fully reflect the committee member’s online view as of the time of the download. However, once the submission progresses past the committee member step, downloads of the submission from the History table will not include the member responses, as they are not part of the permanent submission record.

If committee members used a Member Form to collaborate during a committee step, and the submission is eventually sent back to that committee step by a subsequent reviewer, will they regain access to their “My Response” content?

Yes, but they will be visible only as unsubmitted draft responses. Committee members would need to re-publish their responses in order for the chair to see them again.