Universities today face a challenging operating context with senior leaders navigating unprecedented financial constraints and resourcing pressures. At the same time, universities aspire to grow and innovate, so there is a need for universities to deliver high-quality education with limited resources. These twin pressures mean effective decision-making needs to take place right across the university.
In this context, university leaders are thinking anew about what they teach: the size and shape of their taught portfolio, and how they teach: innovative teaching design and delivery, paired with the right use of available teaching capacity. But often this work is let down or progress is slowed by missing or poor-quality data, disparate tools and workload models, and varied approaches to managing and planning for teaching activity across the university.
How can universities effectively manage their teaching to maximize resources and outcomes amidst increasing pressure to achieve both teaching efficiency and better outcomes for students? NousCubane has launched a new Teaching Effort Benchmark offer focused on exactly this question. Findings have highlighted both common challenges as well as lead practices for managing teaching effort and making informed decisions about the taught portfolio.
Teaching Effort Benchmark participant Griffith University has taken important steps forward in achieving leading practice, especially around how to act as ‘one institution’ without drowning out the views and expertise of academics. Below we describe the key elements of Griffith’s approach which includes a university-wide Teaching Allocation Tool and plans to move towards a single university-wide Academic Workload Model (AWM) to enable a standardised approach to managing teaching effort across the institution.
Consistency in academic workload models is important, but flexibility should still exist
Leading practice suggests creating greater consistency in the Academic Workload Model (AWM) for teaching effort is key to enabling a university-wide approach, however there is of course nuance in the detail of teaching across disciplines and across schools which must be considered.
At Griffith, effective management of teaching effort and informed decision making has been enabled by the evolution of a standardised, driver-based academic resourcing model. The model was initially established to support course costing several years ago and now enables decision making across the university.
Griffith currently has four faculty-based AWMs but plans to move to a single university AWM that still offers suitable room for flexibility at the school level, recognising the importance of meeting the needs of different disciplines. The model defines a set of internal metrics that contextualise teaching resourcing requirements. In practice, academic leads are provided with data on how their courses align to the university metrics to provide insight on where there may be opportunities to address teaching capacity constraints through course redesign or delivery changes. However, this data is to be used as a guide in designing courses, not as a requirement.
A university-wide approach requires the right tools and quality inputs
Having access to a single view of teaching resourcing across the institution is a crucial early step in adopting good practice. This enables better planning and resource allocation across the institution but requires credible data and reliable inputs.
Griffith’s approach features a university-wide Teaching Allocation Tool (TAT), which defines the principles underpinning the planning of teaching resourcing. The starting point for all units of study resourcing is a simple, standard framework of teaching activities and associated resourcing needs, with scaling for student load. Resourcing estimates are then refined via workload formulas from the four faculty-based Academic Workload Models, soon to be replaced by an overarching single university model that allows for school-based differences for discipline specific activities.
A key benefit of this approach is that university leaders can have confidence that there is a consistent method to gathering and reporting this important data: the much-sought after ‘single source of truth’.
Effective workload tools should inform key design decisions
Workload tools have the greatest impact when they are used to inform key initiatives such as the review of existing courses and the design and approvals of new programs and units of study.
Like many universities today, Griffith University has examined how it might streamline its current offering and pathways, including subject choices for students. To support this, a Program Design Tool was developed, using relevant course costing and workload data, that provides clear and consistent guidance on whether a program can accommodate more units of study, based on student load. This insight informs the decision process of future programs and the assessment of existing offerings.
A bottom-up, iterative approach is needed
Developing an effective approach to managing teaching effort requires good decision making and buy-in at the local level – in faculties, schools and departments – something that can only be achieved bottom-up. However, this also needs to be balanced with a degree of standard principles and process, as issues often arise when there is too much flexibility.
Initially, Griffith’s Teaching Allocation Tool was developed using a ‘top down’ approach based on available data, but this did not capture the critical drivers of teaching effort, a barrier to achieving buy-in and limiting the span of its use. The university then revised the tool, based on actual teaching workload as reported by academic staff. To do this, the university involved academic leadership and staff via multi-disciplinary working groups and surveys of academic staff who taught representative units within Disciplines. Over time, buy-in to the Teaching Allocation Tool has increased as the data provided better reflects the realities and nuances of each discipline.
Framing and leadership matters
Like all change and improvement initiatives, executive sponsorship is key to success long term.
At Griffith, senior university leaders drove the introduction of the new standardised model as a tool for academic empowerment, designed to support faculties in demonstrating, using data, where additional teaching resourcing may be required. The program of reviewing course designs against the benchmark was titled ‘Making space in the work week’, reflecting the genuine intent to better manage and improve academic workloads.
Griffith University’s approach highlights that standardised tools, senior sponsorship, and local input and buy-in, universities can create the conditions necessary to better inform key decisions and manage teaching resourcing effectively.
If you would like to explore the issues and approaches covered in this article in more detail and think that the Teaching Effort Benchmarking could be helpful in supporting your institution’s priorities around teaching resource management, please contact us.