Operations
Balancing lecturer workload
Every department has the same argument every year, and it is rarely about the total number of hours.
What the argument is actually about
Total contact hours are the easy part and are usually already agreed. The disputes are about shape: who teaches at eight in the morning, whose teaching is spread across five days rather than concentrated into two, who gets the large first-year lecture and who gets four small seminars, and whose research day survives.
None of these are visible in a total-hours figure, which is why presenting one to a sceptical department has never once ended an argument.
The measures worth reporting
- Total contact hours per lecturer and per department — necessary but not sufficient
- Teaching days per week, which is what determines whether a research day is possible
- Distribution across the day, showing who carries the unpopular slots
- Session count versus hour count, since four one-hour seminars cost far more than one four-hour block
- Preparation-weighted load, where new modules are recognised as more expensive than repeats
- Number of distinct modules taught, a better proxy for preparation burden than hours
Where self-service availability changes things
The most useful change is not a better report. It is that lecturers enter their own availability, which relocates the argument from after the timetable to before it.
When a lecturer books the hours they are free through a web system and the timetable is generated against exactly that, the conversation about an unwelcome slot becomes a conversation about what they submitted rather than about what the timetabling office decided. Most of the heat leaves it.
It also makes genuine unfairness visible for the first time: if one member of staff consistently submits wide availability and another submits almost none, the resulting load difference is documented rather than inferred.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.