ANECA estrena una nueva herramienta de seguimiento del programa de acreditación estatal

The new ANECA state accreditation procedure, regulated by Royal Decree 678/2023, has marked a turning point in the evaluation of university teaching staff since April 1, 2024. The need to adapt this evaluation program to the provisions of the Organic Law on the University System and the aforementioned royal decree was seen by ANECA as an opportunity to undertake a profound reform not only of the procedure itself, the curriculum model, and the evaluation criteria, but also of the coordination and work of the accreditation committees, as well as ethical issues and academic integrity.

In addition, this reform has been guided by the principles and commitments made by ANECA to the Coalition for the Advancement of Research Assessment (CoARA), which the Agency has extended to the entire academic career and is actively implementing through its 2024-2027 Action Plan.

Among these principles is that of data transparency, an issue on which ANECA has taken very important steps, publishing weekly reports on the status of pending and completed evaluations in each of the 30 accreditation committees.

To reinforce these information and transparency measures, and in accordance with the actions committed to in ANECA's new Strategic Plan 2025-2030, we are presenting a new tool that allows users to see not only the status of evaluations in each committee, but also the accumulated data on applications received and evaluated by year, gender, category, and autonomous community; the resolution times; as well as basic data on applicants for tenured university professor and university chair positions, such as average age, number of six-year or five-year periods, and cumulative success rates. This information will be updated daily, can be filtered by each of the accreditation committees, and will be permanently available on our website via the link: https://www.aneca.es/personal-funcionario1

The development of this tool (dashboard) was based on the use of the ACADEMIA program database, hosted in an on-premises SQL Server environment, i.e., on ANECA's own servers. Compared to a cloud-based alternative, this configuration involves direct administration of resources, security, and processing capacity. In this context, and after analyzing and structuring the ACADEMIA database data model, various ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes were designed and executed to refine, standardize, and consolidate the information from various tables and schemas, generating intermediate views optimized for integration with Power BI.

Once the connection between Power BI and the SQL Server environment was established, a relational data model was configured and measures and columns were developed using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), the formula language used in Power BI to perform advanced calculations and create custom indicators. Dynamic filtering parameters and automatic update processes were also defined to ensure the consistency and availability of the information.

The result is a robust, efficient, and scalable analytical environment that provides a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the data managed at ACADEMIA, which will be of great help to those being evaluated and to the evaluators, and which we will continue to improve with new features.

At ANECA, we are already working on the development of similar tools to provide greater transparency to other evaluation programs.