Time Tracking

We have a "too much" problem at work. There's too much work, too much class, too much crew, just too much. A long time ago we decided that we'd attack the problem by capping the required course load. CMU uses this fairly good system of "units" rather than the normal credit hour. One unit is one hour for a course on average for the whole semester. So if a class is six units then you can expect to spend six hours per week on the class over the course of the semester. Everything a student does should be class and every task for class should be unitted, so if you are honest one ought to be able to handle their load pretty precisely by capping the required units. We picked 56 units. That makes school for the average person just a bit more time consuming than a full time job.

So far I think that's worked fairly well. It did however turn out to be just one facet of a truly complex problem. We would learn that capping the required units would only begin to address the issue.

Even with the load capped we still have the "too much" problem. It does seem like there is not longer too much class, and the question of if there is too much crew would be a lively discussion with people on all sides of the issue. It still does seem though that overall there is still too much. Another metric for too much class though would be rooms and we discovered that capping a student's load does nothing to assure that our offerings fit in our building.

About a year ago I started to think that the next thread to pull on the thing was how much each teacher is teaching. My thought was that were we to discover the faculty were overloaded, and do so in a way that was quantifiable and verifiable, we might be motivated to reduce the number of course offerings and thereby get ourselves to fit in the building.

Fit in the building is actually an oversimplification. The reality of the thing is that the course schedule is so dense as to leave no room for improvisation. Moving one thing necessitates moving so many others as to feel like it necessitates moving everything else. So there's that, and we don't fit in the building.

Anyway it's this last thread that has brought me to time tracking. My thought was that each faculty member is supposed to be be doing some amount of teaching, service, and research. That should allow one to look at the time they need to be spending for service and research, deduct that from the total number of hours, on average, we're supposed to work, and be left with the actual amount of time available in a schedule for teaching. That number of hours could then be broken back into individual courses.

My suspicion was that for an average faculty member teaching classes that are necessarily evolving, so as to require ongoing prep, and that include project work that requires grading there would likely not be time available to teach more than between 2 or 3 classes per semester.

The quick math looks something like: base 50 hour week, 10 hours research (thin BTW), 10 hours service, leaves 30 for teaching. In my world "production" is teaching and production advising would take half of that 30. That leaves 15 hours for class. Two classes would have six hours of face time, three would be nine, six leaves nine and nine leaves six. That remainder is all the prep and grading. I'm not sure that six hours of class requires nine hours of outside time, but nine hours of class could certainly use six. The sweet spot is someplace in the middle. That initial 10 and 10 is a fairly arbitrary assumption. If we're to follow through on this we'll have to come up with better guidance there.

FWIW this semester I am teaching: TD1, TD3, Studiocraft 1, Studiocraft 2, PTM Pro Practice, Thesis, and Stagecraft - but several of those wouldn't count as a full class.

So last week started time tracking. After one week I have learned:

1. I am working the total number of hours I thought I was.
2. I do not spend enough time on research.
3. In the first week I spent nearly equal amounts of time on teaching and service.
4. I do not like time tracking.

The first week probably isn't very indicative of the whole semester. Guess we'll just have to keep after it to see.