ERIC Number: ED535448
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Jun
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1935-3510
EISSN: N/A
A Common-Sense Look at UNC Faculty Workloads
Schalin, Jay
John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (NJ1)
This paper measures the teaching loads of faculty in the University of North Carolina (UNC) system. The impetus for the paper was a statistic provided by the UNC system to the North Carolina legislature's Fiscal Research Division. It claimed that the system-wide average teaching load is 3.37 courses per professor per semester. Based on the Pope Center's knowledge of the UNC system, 3.37 courses seemed extremely high. So we conducted our own study. Determining faculty workloads is not a simple process. Faculty members' duties are usually divided among teaching, research, service and administration, and other activities. Arriving at a single number that provides a meaningful account of a professor's production can be an exceedingly complex task. However, the central purpose of a university is to teach; this study focuses solely on the amount of teaching that faculty do. As a result, the Pope Center has created a quick, simple, and meaningful measure of teaching loads that can be used for policy purposes. We applied our method to data taken directly from the UNC system's online course enrollments. This report is not intended to be a definitive empirical study on the topic of faculty teaching loads. It is instead intended to illustrate approximately how much teaching is actually done by professors in the UNC system, based on a representative sample of faculty. (Contains 4 tables.)
Descriptors: College Faculty, Online Courses, Teaching Load, Higher Education, Teacher Student Ratio
John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. 353 East Six Forks Road Suite 150, Raleigh, NC 27609. Tel: 919-828-1400; Fax: 919-828-7455; e-mail: info@popecenter.org; Web site: http://www.popecenter.org
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
Identifiers - Location: North Carolina
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A