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Current Practice in the Allocation of Academic Workloads
Author(s) -
Barrett Lucinda,
Barrett Peter
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
higher education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.976
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1468-2273
pISSN - 0951-5224
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2007.00367.x
Subject(s) - workload , competition (biology) , variety (cybernetics) , discipline , context (archaeology) , work (physics) , higher education , quality (philosophy) , process (computing) , public relations , business , psychology , medical education , political science , marketing , economics , computer science , management , engineering , economic growth , medicine , mechanical engineering , biology , paleontology , operating system , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , artificial intelligence , law
Significant factors within UK higher education include explicit competition, regulatory demands and pressures to maintain student numbers despite tuition fee increases. Universities have responded by more actively managing finances and quality but seemingly not staff time. This paper sets out findings on the processes and practices surrounding academic workload allocation (WLA) in universities, based on 59 detailed interviews from a cross section of staff. The main findings from this research are that there are a huge variety of different practices surrounding WLA and much potential for improvement. The approaches observed can be seen to work in a continuum from informal to partial, to the more comprehensive. Although many felt the disciplinary context to be very important to the process chosen, the findings of the research reveal that this is not the case.