Efficient and effective assignment of faculty contributes to successful academic planning and enhances the learning environment for both students and educators.
This is because many critical factors for a teaching staff to be useful and perform at their best depend on the administration of the institution that employs them.
A crucial part of this administration is determining each teacher’s academic workload in a given period.
This procedure follows the following steps typically:
The institution must provide a physical and digital communication space for each teacher to report their availability and the subject(s) they can teach in a given period. When using a technological platform for managing institutional resources, the teacher usually enters their information in the system and can verify that the information is correct.
The planning area and degree directors compare the number of schedules, subjects, student sections and working days with the availability of teachers, both permanent and temporary. Then they align this information with the time period’s academic needs.
During this process, the institution makes an initial academic workload proposal. Teachers must accept, modify or reject it according to their availability, for reasons previously validated by the institution for this purpose.
Teachers must have space of time to submit their observations and discrepancies with the proposed schedules.
It is essential that the institution offers face-to-face and digital opportunities for the educator to provide their comments, as well as a transparent process to follow once this feedback is received.
Once comments and/or modifications have been assimilated, teachers are informed of their definitive workload in the academic period before the start of the educational year.
The area in charge must know its teachers’ characteristics well to make this process logical and relevant to strategic planning.
To achieve this, it must continuously produce real and reliable information, through surveys and data storage generated on its institutional resource management platform.
With this in mind, data analysis software can gather an immense amount of information and process it to understand better what educators need to deliver quality teaching.
The collected data should allow the institution to answer the following questions:
The assignment of every teacher’s academic workload is a vital component in the strategic planning of an educational institution.
The plan must follow a rigorous, reliable and meaningful process, aligned with the main institutional objective, which is to provide quality education.
Poor management harms the educational climate, resulting in teachers working on unsuitable schedules, subjects or working days, which affects their performance.