A System for Reporting Faculty Instructional Effort Report of the Task Force for the Implementation of Workload Reporting Policy August 2005 A System for Reporting Faculty Instructional Effort Table of Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................3 Implementation Task Force Report .........................................................................5 Appendices Appendix 1: Implementation Task Force Membership .............................22 Appendix 2: Recent History of Activities Associated with Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities......................................................23 Appendix 3: Describing and Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities, Report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, July 2003 ......................................................................30 Appendix 4: Faculty Instructional Responsibilities: Guidelines for Departmental Policies, Report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, July 2003 .................................................48 Appendix 5: Letter from Provost King appointing Implementation Task Force Members, September 23, 2003 ...................................63 Appendix 6: Letter from President Atkinson to Chancellors, September 9, 2002 .........................................................................68 Appendix 7: Letter from President Atkinson to Chancellors, October 24, 2002............................................................................73 Appendix 8: Diagnostic Analysis of Department Course Data For 2002-2003, Implementation Task Force .................................75 Appendix 9: Report from UCLA Joint Task Force on Departmental Teaching Policies, January 2004..................................................100 Appendix 10:TIE Categories and Faculty Instructional Activity Types ............................................................................................112 ITF Report Final 2 A System for Reporting Faculty Instructional Effort Executive Summary The report of the Task Force for the Implementation of Faculty Instructional Work Load Reporting Policy which follows recommends a new approach to describing and reporting faculty instructional workload and recommends establishing an ongoing program of University teaching policy review. The report’s recommendations are consistent with those of the two reports issued in July 2003 by the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities chaired by Provost King. As the Implementation Task Force considered the methods by which the recommendations of the first Task Force could be implemented, it kept three principles articulated in the earlier reports as a central focus for its considerations: 1. If students obtain academic credit as a result of an instructional activity, so should the faculty who guided that activity receive instructional work load credit. 2. Academic departments (or similar units) should be the unit of accumulation of work load credit – not individual faculty – and its corollary – not all faculty should be expected to provide identical instructional activities. 3. While part of the reporting of faculty instructional work load should be in terms of “classes” or “class equivalents,” additional indices of the outcome of faculty instructional activity – such as student credit hours and numbers of degrees per FTE – should also be regularly included as indicators of instructional activities. The report makes three overarching recommendations: 1. UC should improve the reporting of faculty teaching by contextualizing it within the broader perspective of educational outcomes, such as degrees awarded, graduation rates, and average time to degree. 2. UC should convert to a new system for classifying and reporting classes, called TIE. This system organizes classes into 18 instructional types that roll up into three super-ordinate categories of equal importance that describe the faculty’s instructional goals for students and that convey the faculty’s changing role as students move from introductory classes to more independent scholarly activity as they approach graduation. The three categories are: • • • Transmitting the Knowledge Base Initiating Intellectual Independence Emphasizing Independent Inquiry The TIE system should be used as a systemwide methodology for categorizing faculty instructional activities and should serve as the basis for reporting classes and student credit hours in documents such as the annual report to the legislature. ITF Report Final 3 We recommend that this system be implemented across all campuses of the University in addition to whatever other reporting systems that the individual campuses might wish to maintain for other purposes, such as classroom utilization reporting. Considerable work went into the development of this system and it has been pilot tested with participation from each of the campuses. We believe that the system is workable and while the TIE system itself represents a modification of the system originally proposed by the previous Task Force, that it does meet the goal envisioned in the first set of reports, namely ensuring that UC adopts a new reporting method that more fully conveys the complex nature and the full range of faculty teaching responsibilities and outputs. We also propose a system for calculating and reporting class equivalents. This additional feature of the TIE system is needed because a substantial amount of the instructional activities of the faculty (mainly the types of instruction that fall into the “E” category of the TIE system) does not fall into activities that in commonlanguage terms are usually associated with the term “classes.” These forms of instruction, which are often thought of as individualized instructional activities, are the crowning accomplishment of instruction in a research/scholarship/performance -based university and are as time and energy consuming as any other form of instruction. In order to allow this type of instruction to fit into a reporting system that must also include more traditional classroom-based instruction the concept of “class equivalents” was seen as essential to any reporting mechanism that would reflect those things that faculty do to provide the highest quality education to our students across the full spectrum of our educational mission – undergraduate and graduate, physical and natural sciences, the arts and humanities, the social science and engineering, education and professional. 3. UC should establish an ongoing program of disciplinary teaching policy review and reporting that includes comparisons with peer institutions and internal review at the campus level. This section of the report is consistent with the recommendations made in the initial report of the parent committee and, essentially, calls for the implementation of those recommendations without substantial change in form or content. The recommendations include roles for the Provost in reviewing and overseeing the delegations to each campus related to to faculty instructional workload and practice; the Executive Vice Chancellors with regard to reviewing and approving workload policy statements and monitoring workload practices on the campuses; the Academic Senate in reviewing the assignment of courses to one of the TIE instructional types; and the Office of the President in gathering comparative data from other universities as well as UC campuses, and in reporting to both internal and external audiences on faculty instructional activities in the manner suggested in our report. ITF Report Final 4 A System for Reporting Faculty Instructional Effort Introduction For the past two-and-a-half years, two successive task forces and supporting staff have been working on a new approach to the University of California’s management and reporting of faculty instructional activities.1 While this review was immediately occasioned by the findings of an audit conducted by the Bureau of State Audits (BSA)2, interest in and concern about faculty instructional activity is not new. For many years, legislators in Sacramento have been asking whether the University’s faculty are giving adequate attention to the teaching mission, particularly with regard to undergraduates, and our faculty themselves have asked how completely their activities are reported and if their responsibilities compare equitably across our campuses and with the practices of other comparable research universities Over the years, UC has employed several different reporting approaches, ranging from extensive data systems, to annual faculty surveys, to descriptions of comparable universities’ policies, with mixed results. The questions from Sacramento have ebbed and flowed but never abated, and concerns expressed by our faculty about the inability of any of these approaches to describe fully what they do have also persisted. The original Instructional Activity Task Force, appointed in Fall 2002, and our subsequent Implementation Task Force both firmly believe that it is UC’s obligation to develop meaningful instructional activities policies and to manage the faculty assignment process with care. We also know that it is essential to present data about faculty instructional activities in a manner that exhibits full and open accountability, provides a comprehensive picture of efforts and outputs, and will have meaning to legislators and UC faculty alike. These are not simple tasks. We are, however, convinced that the new approach recommended by the original Task Force and refined by our work will indeed better represent what faculty do and students experience and will improve campus oversight. This report explains how we believe that should happen. Inherent in our recommendations are two primary goals: • • to ensure that the University of California adopts a new reporting methodology that more fully conveys the complex nature and the full range of faculty teaching responsibilities and outputs, and to ensure that the University of California lives up to earlier commitments made to the State for improved policy oversight and additional undergraduate teaching by regular-rank faculty. 1 Appendix 2 provides overviews of the history of reporting faculty instructional activity, the 2001-02 Bureau of State Audits (BSA) report and the University’s response, the work of the Task Force on Instructional Activities, and the work stages of the Implementation Task Force (ITF). 2 University of California: Its Partnership Agreement Could Be Improved to Increase Its Accountability for State Funding, Report of the Bureau of State Audits, July 2002 ITF Report Final 5 Accomplishing these goals will require commitment from the Provost and Senior Vice President, and from each campus Executive Vice Chancellor to make this sometimes controversial, sometimes tedious work an ongoing priority for academic administrators, for the faculty, and for the staff involved. We want to stress that attention to it is essential if the University of California is to assure State officials that our faculty are allocating their time appropriately and that instructional workload is in line with practices at other comparable universities. Rationale for the Implementation Task Force’s recommendations It is no wonder that the issue of faculty workload remains an issue of state concern. The recent Bureau of State Audits review of faculty teaching that focused on “primary classes” identified some reporting errors, and questioned small classes and relatively light undergraduate teaching relative to graduate teaching. The audit illustrated that the system that we now use does not capture faculty teaching effort effectively, nor does it enable UC leaders to explain effectively faculty instructional responsibilities to California policymakers. The reporting system utilized by the University of California for the last decade has created a primary focus that fails to portray the full range of regular-rank faculty teaching. While this system does report both “primary classes3” and “independent study enrollments”, State and University leaders have focused only on the number of primary classes—4.8 per regular-rank faculty FTE in 2002-03. By setting aside independent study, a key element of faculty teaching was ignored, and the primary metric underestimates the actual faculty commitment to instruction. The most recently reported workload statistic of 4.8 primary classes is not representative of faculty instructional effort. We recommend that UC adopt a new system that incorporates all teaching activity, including independent study, and merges it into a single, meaningful measure that represents the full extent of teaching involvement. We recognize that classes-per-faculty must remain a key measure due to legislative interest. However, we recommend that UC report a classes-per-faculty figure that incorporates a measure for independent study. Moreover, classes-per-faculty should be presented and discussed within the context of the number of degrees awarded, which is a metric that can be benchmarked with our comparison institutions. Degrees are a major teaching output of the University and a primary goal of faculty teaching. Only by presenting a comprehensive picture, can we adequately reflect total faculty instructional activity. It is the hope of the Implementation Task Force that the UC administration will adopt and the Academic Senate will support the new reporting system and oversight approach we recommend later in this report. 3 A primary class is defined as a regularly-scheduled, unit-bearing offering of a course, usually known as a lecture or seminar. ITF Report Final 6 Basic Underlying Principles During Task Force discussions, the following basic principles, most of which were articulated in the earlier reports of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities (IATF), were central to our deliberations and recommendations. 1. UC’s system for reporting faculty instructional activity must, to the fullest extent possible, emphasize the total activity—not just primary classes—of the regular rank faculty. (It should also represent the efforts of the entire instructional force of the institution, but we leave that aspect of reporting to UCOP discretion). 2. If a student at any level receives academic credit for an activity, the faculty should receive credit for having provided the instruction and/or supervision. 3. Multiple indices of educational outcomes and instructional activity are required to reflect the complexity of instruction at UC and to fully inform the faculty, administration, and the public. 4. Care should be taken to make UC reporting meaningful to the multiple external and internal audiences to whom it is presented. 5. The University as whole should be the unit of measure for external purposes. 6. At each campus, the Executive Vice Chancellor should be responsible for monitoring and approving instructional workload policies. Primary responsibility should be delegated to academic departments to ensure that a high quality instructional program, consistent with the standards of the discipline, is available to students so they may complete the requirements of the major in an appropriate time period. 7. Department policies must be explicit about normal assigned course loads, general responsibilities for individualized instruction, course reassignments, and other aspects of mounting the teaching program. 8. Collective responsibility is essential; and individual variation is valued as a means of mounting the best possible teaching and research programs. For this reason, the department, as opposed to the individual faculty member, is the unit for accumulation of instruction workload credit. 9. New policies and reporting mechanisms must be consistent with the fundamental tenets of shared governance. While the reporting of faculty instructional work load is essentially an administrative matter, the faculty has complete control over the curriculum. The essential faculty role, through the Academic Senate, must be sustained. 10. Campus systems should be sufficiently robust to handle multiple reporting approaches: a) to credit individual faculty with all of their teaching whether it occurs within their home department or in another unit and b) to report all department/program teaching, even when taught by faculty from other units. ITF Report Final 7 Recommendations A. We recommend that UC improve the reporting of faculty teaching by contextualizing it within the broader perspective of educational outcomes. The Implementation Task Force is in full agreement with the Instructional Activities Task Force (IATF) that it is essential to report UC teaching metrics only in the context of the outcome of that teaching. This includes, most especially, the annual report to the Legislature and the discussions of the results in Sacramento. The IATF explained this as follows: In discussion and reports about faculty instructional activities, there is a tendency to emphasize process measures—the number of classes taught or the number of students enrolled. But to be meaningful, any discussion of faculty instructional effort must begin with clear measures of the outcomes of that effort. If the intention is for dollars invested to produce meaningful and valuable results, then evidence of those results should be presented and carefully assessed.4 The Implementation Task Force endorses the IATF recommendation for displaying educational outcomes to contextualize teaching statistics. In Exhibit 1 we recommend a specific display format that incorporates the three essential outcome metrics, all representing aspects of the University of California’s public accountability and all dependent upon faculty teaching, the effectiveness of the curriculum, and the efficiency of its delivery: • • • Degrees awarded Graduation rates Average time to degree 4 Describing and Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities, Report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, University of California, July 2003 p. 8. See Appendix 3. ITF Report Final 8 Exhibit 1 Degrees Awarded Per Regular-Rank Faculty FTE 2002-03 Masters/ Bachelor's Degrees Professional Degrees Ph.D Degrees All Degrees 1.7 3.5 2.6 2.0 0.5 0.3 4.9 5.9 4.5 1.1** 0.3 6.0 Comparisons 4 Private Universities* 4 Public Universities* University of California *Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Illinois, SUNY-Buffalo, Virginia, Michigan **The relatively small number of masters/professional degrees at UC is due in part to California’s differentiated system of higher education. Many masters degrees in professional fields, such as business and education are given by CSU. In other states the research university has this responsibility. Average Time to Degree for UC Undergraduates Quarters to Graduation 13.0 13.0 12.9 Freshmen Entering in Fall 1994 Fall 1995 Fall 1996 Berkeley’s semesters have been converted to quarters in this calculation. Percent of Undergraduates Graduating from Comparable Universities within Six Years (Entered as freshmen in 1996) Comparisons 28 Public AAU Universities 68% 4 Public Comparison Universities* 78% University of California *Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, SUNY-Buffalo ITF Report Final 9 76% B. We recommend that UC convert to a new system for classifying and reporting classes, called TIE. We recommend that a modified version of the IATF’s “Total Instructional Effort” (TIE) system be adopted. In the four sub-sections that follow, we explain the three TIE categories, indicate the underlying taxonomy, discuss our recommended reporting approach, and compare TIE to the current UC methodology. B.1 Description of the TIE Categories Within the context of the educational outcomes discussed above, TIE would be used internally and externally to explain and quantify the various forms of instruction in a research university. We recommend using TIE to organize classes into three categories of equal importance that describe the faculty’s instructional goals for students and that convey the faculty’s changing role as students move from introductory classes to more independent scholarly activity as they approach graduation. TIE recognizes that UC faculty members design curricula that include a rich diversity of course types and a mixture of large and small classes, ensuring that students receive necessary individual attention and a broad exposure to research techniques and experiences. We begin by describing the three equal TIE categories of teaching: • • • Transmitting the Knowledge Base: In this type of course, faculty provide instruction that is designed to transmit the knowledge base, skills, methodologies, analytical approaches and techniques associated with a discipline or field, ranging from the basic to the advanced level. The course content is developed by the faculty, and organized on the basis of a syllabus or plan developed in advance of the beginning of the course. In courses of this type, there may be a great deal of interaction between the instructor and the student (in the form of class discussion, office meetings, email communication, etc.) but the basic feature of the course is that there is a fixed body of knowledge that is to be transmitted by the instructor and mastered by the student. Initiating Intellectual Independence: In this type of course, faculty develop students’ abilities to pursue creative/professional/scholarly work as required by the discipline or field. Participation provides experience with the methodologies of the discipline or field and requires prior acquisition of the relevant knowledge base and skills. Instruction, both content and pedagogy, is more experiential in nature and tailored to the needs and interests of the particular students. It may involve small groups or teams of students working on faculty-assigned projects/tasks under the direct supervision of the faculty. These courses are designed to enhance students’ problem solving abilities, critical analysis capabilities, and individual creativity to enable them to apply their knowledge to complex problems, issues and techniques. Emphasizing Independent Inquiry: In this type of course, faculty guide, mentor, and monitor advanced students who are undertaking independent creative/professional/scholarly work, generally as a culmination to their degree ITF Report Final 10 program. Students’ participation requires that they have gained a mastery of the area they choose to pursue. These are one-on-one (or very small) group experiences with intensive interaction between the faculty member and the student. Students play an active role in defining the topic to be studied or the project to be undertaken, including the approach to the inquiry. Courses in this category usually meet on an ad hoc basis in a location convenient to both the student and the faculty member. These three TIE categories represent the different goals of instruction that UC faculty set, in common with faculty at other research universities, and that are essential to produce graduates at the baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral levels. Using undergraduate education in Political Science at UCLA as an exemplar, the photographs and descriptions on the next page illustrate how instructional responsibilities of the faculty vary and how they are suited to students’ learning needs and development. ITF Report Final 11 ITF Report Final 12 B.2 Description of TIE’s Underlying Instructional Type Taxonomy Classifying nearly 70,000 UC classes into the TIE categories is based upon a taxonomy of 18 instructional types. The distinctions among these categories require going beyond former classification approaches to understand what kind of teaching and learning experience is taking place. Seminars, for example, are no longer a single category; we classify seminars depending upon whether the central goal of the class is to transmit knowledge, or to initiate educational independence -- two of the core principles inherent in the three TIE categories. Pilot testing showed that, despite such distinctions, individual classes may have characteristics of more than one of the three TIE categories. This is particularly true in graduate courses, which may simultaneously prepare students for intellectual independence even as they allow those students to begin independent inquiry. We also found that many senior project classes contain both information transmittal and mentoring aspects. In all such cases, classification will be based upon the class’s central or primary objectives. It is also important to note that students of all levels, lower division undergraduates through advanced doctoral students, will take a mix of courses throughout their time at the University. Finally, there is no a priori relationship between the category in which a course type appears and the number of students enrolled, although it is likely that most large classes are designed to transmit the knowledge base. We show below how the 18 instructional types are aggregated into each TIE category; definitions of each of the 18 types may be found in Appendix 10. Transmitting the Knowledge Base Fieldwork—Skills/Techniques Laboratory—Skills/Technique Lecture Lecture plus Supplementary Activity Seminar—Topical Studio—Technique Initiating Intellectual Independence Fieldwork—Research Internship Laboratory—Research Legal/Medical Clerkship Practicum Practicum—Teaching Project Seminar—Research/Creative Development Studio—Production/Performance Tutorial ITF Report Final 13 Emphasizing Independent Inquiry Conference Individualized Instruction ITF members believe that the assignment of courses is best done at the lowest possible level – usually the department level. For already-existing courses, a one-time coding of all approved courses should be undertaken by the departments with the guidance of the institutional research office and the registrar. The institutional research offices have been highly involved in the piloting of the TIE approach and have the technical knowledge of how the process works and areas in which difficult decisions occur. For new courses, assignment of TIE categories should be thought of as part of the course approval processes with the requirement that all new courses have a designation of one of the 18 categories. On each campus the Academic Senate Division should play an active role through periodic review of the process. B.3 Format and Approach for Using TIE for Legislative and Other External Reports In Table 1 we present the format that UC should use for reporting classes-per-faculty information to the Legislature and in other situations when such data are requested. This table shows the distribution of classes and student credit hours across the TIE categories, taught by regular-rank faculty in 2002-03, along with the per- regular-rank-FTE measures for each TIE category. Table 1: TIE Methodology (Initial Test) 2002-03 Number of Classes or Class Equivalents* Classes Per Regular Rank FTE Number of Student Credit Hours (SCH) SCH per Regular Rank FTE T-Classes: Transmitting the Knowledge Base 22,258 3.8 3,616,723 614.8 I-Classes: Initiating Intellectual Independence 17,221 2.9 313,852 53.3 E-Classes: Emphasizing Independent Inquiry ___15,487___ ___2.6___ __281,869__ ___47.9___ 54,966 9.3 4,212,444 716.0 Total Note: Number of Regular Rank Faculty FTE = 5,883 * E-Classes only –see next page for discussion of “class equivalents” We agree with the IATF that, in addition to contextualizing information about educational outcomes as discussed in Recommendation A, parallel data about SCH5 should always accompany class data. Because classes have varying characteristics (size, meeting times, preparation responsibilities, out-of-class contact, etc.), including a second measure along with the number of classes taught provides a more complete picture of 5 Student Credit Hours (SCH) represent the multiple of unit credit in a class times the number of students in that class summed over all classes. SCH are the basis upon which UC receives state funding. ITF Report Final 14 faculty work that will enrich public understanding and assure faculty that UC is communicating a more accurate picture of how they educate students. The IATF recommended that class enrollments also be included. At this time, however, we are not certain this would add useful information beyond the concepts inherent in SCH data. The UC Office of the President will gather number of classes, SCH, and enrollment data from the campuses. We ask that UCOP make the final decision about whether or not enrollment data is necessary to paint a complete picture of faculty instructional workload. As indicated in Table 1, an additional step is required to report E-Classes (Emphasizing Independent Inquiry) in this manner, primarily due to the nature of doctoral education. At the later stages of study, doctoral students spend considerable time with faculty in a variety of one-on-one relationships, such as supervised individual research/creative work, collaborative work, and preparation for the dissertation. These interactions are intertwined and not conducive to detailed record keeping, and current practices vary across campuses and even among similar departments within campuses. While one department may try to capture each student’s interactions in differentiated classes of perhaps four units each, another will lump them all together and show only one course with eight-to-twelve units. The number of SCH awarded for the totality of the interaction, therefore, tends to be more consistent and is more representative of faculty effort than is the number of class enrollments or the number of classes itself. If one does count classes as now recorded on the campuses, these current practices result in 5.0 E-Classes per regular rank FTE. We spent many hours considering the meaning of this figure and reviewing various options for overcoming this consistency problem. We wanted to avoid possible future fluctuations if enrollment practices change, and we wanted a metric for class-equivalents that could be justified in relationship to other classes (T and I) where there is greater consistency of reporting and content. In the end, we recommend that E-Class-equivalents be derived from the SCH output of those faculty/student interactions based upon average SCH in I-Classes, which also tend to be small and individualized. We believe that this approach will present a reasonable and justifiable picture of the significant time and commitment of UC’s faculty to this demanding type of education. The calculation of E-Class equivalents reported in Table 1 is shown below using data from that table. The average number of SCH in I-Classes is 18.2. We convert E-Classes to E-Class equivalents by dividing the number of SCH in E-Classes by the average SCH per I-Class. To get the number of E-Class equivalents per FTE, we divide the number of E-Class equivalents by the number of FTE (5883). The result is 2.6 E-Class Equivalents per regular-rank FTE, which UC would report in lieu of the 5.0 E-Classes per Regular Rank FTE that results from the current inconsistent registration process. ITF Report Final 15 Calculating E-Class Equivalents A B C=A/B D E=D/C F=E/5883 (FTE) # SCH in I-Classes # I Classes SCH per I-Class 313,852 17,221 18.2 SCH in E-Classes # E Class Equivalents # of E-Class Equivalents per Regular-Rank FTE 281,869 15,487 2.6 B.4 Comparing TIE to the Current UC Methodology Table 2 displays the 2002-03 results from the current accounting system that reports Primary Classes and Independent Study Enrollments. Primary Classes are defined as regularly-scheduled, unit-bearing course offerings, of which lectures and seminars are common examples. Independent Study includes all other instructional activities for which students receive credit toward their degrees and that meet on an as-needed basis convenient to the faculty member and the student. Independent Study Enrollments are presented separately; i.e., their values are not included in the metric “classes per regularrank FTE.” Thus, when 4.8 classes per faculty FTE becomes a focus of discussion, it is missing a significant component of UC faculty effort. Table 2: Current Methodology: “Primary Classes” and “Independent Study Enrollments” 2002-03 Primary Classes Independent Study Enrollments Total Classes Number of Classes 28,123 28,123 Classes Per Regular Rank FTE 4.8 NA 4.8 Number of Student Credit Hours (SCH) 3,787,385 432,206 4,219,591 SCH per FTE 643.8 73.5 717.3* Note: Number of Regular Rank Faculty FTE = 5,883 *717.3 is the UC official SCH per FTE: the slight difference between this number and the test results in Table 1 (716.0) are due to technical issues that will be eliminated when TIE is officially implemented. The TIE classification framework is not based on the concept of regularly scheduled vs. ad hoc meetings. Rather, it is based on the predominant nature of the instruction. Thus, using TIE required moving from two course groupings to three and led to some shifts: • While most Primary Classes were classified as T-Classes, others moved into the I category based upon their pedagogical goals. Examples include research seminars that center on individual student projects. • Some Independent Study classes were classified as I-Classes, based on their pedagogical goals and no longer bound by the formal schedule criterion. Examples include TA practica that were not pre-scheduled because of the need to accommodate all of the TA’s schedules. ITF Report Final 16 There were a small number of other adjustments, but they were de minimus. The drawing below illustrates the basic relationship. T-Classes Primary Classes I-Classes Independent Study E-Classes Thus the 4.8 Primary Classes per Regular Rank FTE can be understood as the sum of 3.8 T-Classes plus a subset of I-Classes. Estimating the Relationship of TIE Classes and “Primary Classes” While we believe strongly that faculty instructional activity should be reported using the TIE method, we recognize that during the transition between using the current and the proposed method (TIE) some people will be interested in seeing how the numbers of classes in the TIE method relate to the numbers of “primary classes” resulting from the current method. Table 3 below combines T-Classes, and I-Classes with enrollments greater than 2 to estimate of the number of TIE classes that are similar to the current method’s “primary classes.” As stated above, we estimate that most of the T-Classes were formerly “primary classes.” The I-Classes are composed of both Primary Classes and some Independent Study. For this exercise, we assume that any I-Class with 1 or 2 students would in the past have been reported as Independent Study, so we subtracted those from the total number of I-Classes. Combining the number of T-Classes and IClasses with enrollments of three or more student, yields an estimated 5.0 classes per regular-rank FTE, demonstrating congruence with the current methodology that yields 4.8 primary classes per regular-rank FTE. ITF Report Final 17 Table 3. Estimating the Number of “Primary Classes” from TIE 2002-03 Estimate of “Primary Classes” Classes Per Regular Rank FTE All T-Classes 22,258 3.8 I-Classes with enrollments > 2 7,273 1.2 29,531 5 Estimate of “Primary Classes” Note: Number of Regular Rank Faculty FTE = 5,883 C. We recommend that UC establish an ongoing program of disciplinary teaching policy review and reporting that includes comparisons with peer institutions and internal review at the campus level. This recommendation addresses one of our two primary goals: “to ensure that the University of California lives up to earlier commitments made to the State for improved policy oversight and additional undergraduate teaching by ladder faculty.” The University’s commitments to the state in this arena were set forth in letters from former President Atkinson (Appendices 6 and 7) containing delegations to the Chancellors and Executive Vice Chancellors. One aspect of this oversight deserves discussion: UC’s ability to obtain valid and comparable data on teaching loads and practices at peer institutions. We spent a considerable amount of time seeking sources and approaches for this purpose. We found only one research university that publishes such data and their data reporting system is inconsistent with UC’s approach. Committee members also interviewed colleagues at other institutions, and these conversations generally confirmed the policy ranges for broad disciplines that UC has cited in its annual report on teaching activity for several years. While these policy numbers do not make it possible to make precise comparisons to UC reported class counts, they do enable meaningful reflection and discussion about the similarity of UC teaching loads to our competition. But there is no mechanism for assurance that the definition of a course at another institution is the same as a UC course, and no institution was willing to share its actual ladder faculty teaching load by discipline. As a result, UC will have to continue to express the teaching policies of our peers in ranges, with explanations of the variations that necessarily flow from differences in curricula, term length (e.g., semesters vs. quarters), the balance of undergraduate and graduate enrollment, etc. Thus, we conclude that in practice it is impossible to collect more detailed, consistent, and documented information on classes-taught-per-faculty at other institutions. This finding is a factor in the recommendations that follow. ITF Report Final 18 Based upon earlier UC directives, the recommendations of the IATF, and our conversations and investigations, we make the following recommendations: 1. The Provost should a. Review and oversee the delegations to each campus Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor related to faculty instructional workload policy and practice. The essential elements are described below as recommendations for the Executive Vice Chancellors. b. Propose a policy for assigning TIE designations. This policy shall be brought to the Academic Senate in academic year 2005-06 for consultation, and a final policy should be put in place by July 1, 2006. 2. The Executive Vice Chancellors should be asked to continue taking responsibility for: a. Reviewing and approving existing instructional workload policy statements (and all changes). Departments should be expected to review their written policy in detail to be certain that it is a complete statement of instructional workload policies, including comparisons with peer institutions (as collected by the Office of the President and supplemented by department efforts), undergraduate teaching responsibilities, and course release and buyout practices. Our committee considered UCLA guidelines (Appendix….), and we commend them as a model that may assist other UC campuses. b. Providing updated policies to the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs on an as-requested basis. We recommend that this be done on a biennial basis instead of annually. c. Comparing the formal workload policies of the units with actual data to: • Ensure that actual teaching conforms to department policy, (after allowance for research buyouts, course reassignments, normal year-toyear variations for special circumstances, and alternate-year courses, etc.). • Assess the degree to which the policies and practice seem to be consistent across similar disciplines within the campus6. 6 While the ITF recommends that the Office of the President develop comparative data by discipline for UC and comparable institutions, we also note that data at the specific departmental level should be used with great care. Such data can be useful in facilitating a conversation with a department about its success in meeting workload goals, but because of the differences in the way courses in the curriculum are structured and delivered, particularly with regard to how lectures, laboratories, and discussion sections are combined and the number of classes and units associated with each action, workload statistics across departments and campuses are not necessarily directly comparable. The department-level data should not be published or routinely shared among ITF Report Final 19 d. • Ensure that stated course loads are comparable to course loads in that field as practiced at the other UC campuses and that they are generally consistent with stated policy loads at comparison institutions (data to be provided through the Office of the President, as outlined below). • The EVC and relevant dean should work with any unit that is below comparison institutions or has not specified teaching loads completely to make appropriate modifications to their instructional workload statements and practices. Providing the required level of undergraduate instruction, appropriately distributed among classes taught by regular rank faculty and classes taught by other instructors. e. Ensuring that each campus has an explicit written policy about the circumstances under which faculty may and may not have departmental expectations about their instructional activities reduced. This should include a listing of administrative positions and Academic Senate responsibilities for which reductions are allowed and a reiteration of the University’s policy on modified duties for accommodating child-rearing responsibilities (APM 76028). In addition, each campus should have a clear written policy about the extent to which reduced teaching obligations for a limited period may be a subject of negotiation in recruitments. Each campus’s policy should be submitted to the Provost and Senior Vice President – Academic Affairs for review. All actual release time should be reported to the Executive Vice Chancellor. 3. The Academic Senate should review this system for reporting faculty instructional effort by reviewing the assignment process and its consequences on a periodic basis. In addition, the Senate should have on-going participation in the assignment process, usually through the course approval process. 4. The Office of the President should be responsible for: a. Gathering comparative data on teaching policies at UC comparison institutions and at all UC campuses. In consultation with the Council of Vice Chancellors, UCOP should develop a plan for reviewing at least five disciplines each year on a rolling basis designed to cover all UC disciplines over time. campuses unless they are part of documents and processes that contain explanatory information for each department about how faculty efforts are deployed. See Appendix 9: Diagnostic Analysis of Department Course Data form 2002-03, Implementation Task Force ITF Report Final 20 b. Gathering actual teaching data for those disciplines from each UC campus. These data should be used to ensure that i) UC policies are consistent and competitive with our peer institutions and ii) campus use of the TIE system is consistent and robust in order to ensure effective reporting of faculty teaching to the Legislature. Results should be used to advise the Provost/ Senior Vice President about issues warranting systemwide attention and should be distributed to the EVCs for use in evaluating department policy and practice. c. Gathering TIE data and reporting it to the Legislature in the manner suggested. d. Conducting a full comparison of TIE and the current UC methodology in the first year of reporting under the new approach. This will provide UC and campus leadership with the ability to explain the new TIE methodology to the Academic Senate, individual faculty, and the Legislature and demonstrate its meaning and how it presents an improved image of faculty instructional activities and outcomes. ITF Report Final 21 APPENDIX 1 Membership of Task Force for the Implementation of Faculty Instructional Work Load Reporting Policy Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, UCEP Chair (2003-04), Professor, Civil/Environmental Engineering, Berkeley Mark Appelbaum (Task Force Chair), Associate Vice Chancellor, Undergraduate Education, Professor of Psychology, San Diego George Blumenthal, Academic Council Vice Chair (2003-04), Academic Council Chair (200405), Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Santa Cruz George Brown, Vice Provost Academic Affairs, Professor of Physics, Santa Cruz Robert Heath, Interim Director Office of Undergraduate Education, Professor of Plant Physiology & Biophysics, Riverside Herbert Killackey, Associate Executive Vice Chancellor, Professor of Neurobiology & Behavior, Irvine Joseph Kiskis, UCEP Chair (2004-05), Professor of Physics, Davis Catherine Koshland, Vice Provost, Academic Planning & Facilities, Professor of Public Health (May 2004 – present), Berkeley Gene Lucas, Executive Vice Chancellor, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Santa Barbara Paula Lutomirski, Associate Vice Chancellor, Los Angeles Nancy Tanaka, Executive Director of Academic Affairs, Merced Patricia Turner, Interim Dean, Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies; Vice Provost Undergraduate Studies; Professor of American Studies/African American/African Studies, Davis William Webster, Vice Provost, Academic Planning & Facilities, Professor, Civil/Environmental Engineering, Berkeley (September 2003-April 2004) Staff: Robert Daly, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Academic Planning and Budget, Riverside Paul Eykamp, Coordinator Long-Range Enrollment Analysis and Database Development, Office of the President Linda Guerra, Acting Assistant Vice President, Academic Strategic Planning and Analysis, Office of the President Anne Machung, Coordinator Comparative Data Analysis, Academic Affairs, Office of the President Sandra Smith, Assistant Vice President Planning and Analysis, Academic Affairs, Office of the President Caroline West, Director Analysis and Information Management, Los Angeles Other advisers: Lawrence Hershman, Vice President, Budget, Office of the President Jerry Kissler, Assistant Vice President, Budgetary Planning and Fiscal Analysis, Budget Office, Office of the President Debora Obley, Assistant Vice President, Budget Development and External Relations, Budget Office, Office of the President 22 APPENDIX 2 University of California Recent History of Activities Associated with Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities The 2001-02 BSA Audit On September 12, 2001 the Joint Legislative Audit Committee authorized the Bureau of State Audits (BSA) to conduct a comprehensive audit of the University’s performance under the Partnership Agreement with the Governor. This marked a new chapter in the University of California’s focus on the reporting of faculty instructional activities. In the sections that follow, we describe the current reporting methodology, the BSA audit, and the University’s response, including two UC-wide task forces that were central to that response. We draw upon the excellent report of the first task force to document this history. UC’s Current Reporting Methodology The University’s current approach to public reporting of faculty instructional activities was put in place in the early 1990’s when the state experienced serious budget difficulties that resulted in budget cuts to many state-supported institutions and agencies, including UC. The formal vehicle for this is the University’s annual report to the Legislature, Undergraduate Instruction and Faculty Teaching Activities. The following description of that report was included in the July 2003 report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities (IATF): The legislative report was designed to inform legislators about University activities to improve the undergraduate academic experience and to address concerns about teaching. Part I of that report described ways the campuses sustained excellence in undergraduate education and presented examples of innovative programs. Part II responded to 1992 Supplemental Budget Language expressing the Legislature’s intent that UC faculty members increase their average instruction responsibilities by one additional class over a three-year period, and asking the University to report annually on the average teaching activity of regular-rank faculty. That section of the report has indicated that over time the ratio of primary classes taught per regular-rank faculty member ranged from 4.5 in 1990-91 to a high of 5.0 in 1996-97 through 1998-99. That ratio in 1999-00 was 4.9. Part III of the University’s annual report responded to the 1985 Supplemental Language asking the University to report annually on its instructional activities policies for full-time tenure track faculty and on the policies at its salary comparison institutions.1 In its 2000-01 four-year Partnership Agreement with Governor Davis, the University committed to continue to maintain the increase in faculty teaching that resulted from the 1 Describing and Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities, Report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, University of California, July 2003, p. 1 Historical Appendix Final 23 efforts of the early 1990’s, that is, maintaining a ratio of at least 4.8 primary classes per regular-rank faculty member.2 Furthermore, the current Higher Education Compact, an agreement between Governor Schwarzenegger, the University of California, and the California State University, includes a statement that UC will provide to the Governor, Secretary of Education, the fiscal committees of the Legislature, the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Department of Finance an annual report that includes information on faculty instructional activities per FTE. The annual report to the Legislature remains an essential communication of the University’s good faith in responding to contemporary commitments to the state. The most recent report was submitted to the Legislature in August 2001, providing data on academic year 1999-00, which was the base for the BSA report. Subsequent reports have not been provided due to the work that is described here. The Nature of the Audit and the University’s Response The BSA was instructed to analyze the University’s annual Undergraduate Instruction and Faculty Teaching Activities report and present conclusions on any trends that the BSA identified. The report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities (IATF) (Appendix 3) provides a summary of the Audit activities. As a consequence of their analysis, the BSA included among its recommendations the following: UC should: o Clarify the definitions of primary classes and independent study in the instructions that UCOP sends to the campuses. o Ensure that the campuses consistently interpret the definitions of primary class and independent study by periodically reviewing the campuses’ data for accuracy and consistency. o Review more closely the existing classifications of classes and make corrections where appropriate. This review should include, but not be limited to, primary classes with low enrollments. o Report workload statistics for non-regular rank faculty, as well as the regular rank FTE. As part of the audit process, the University had the opportunity to comment on the findings, prior to the public release of the audit report. President Atkinson’s July 15, 2002 letter of response to the BSA is incorporated in the official audit report. In that letter, the President reaffirmed the University’s commitment to achieving the goals for instructional activities stated by the Legislature in Supplemental Language and by the Governor in the Partnership Agreement. President Atkinson indicated that the University would examine the lowenrollment classes (those identified as having one to two students) and would remove from the reported count any that should not be defined as classes, categorizing them properly as independent study, if that is what they are. He also indicated that the University would 2 A primary class was defined as a regularly-scheduled, unit-bearing offering of a course, usually known as a lecture or seminar. Regular-rank faculty FTE includes only those available to teach, that is, not on sabbatical or other leave. 24 include information about the teaching activities of non-regular-rank faculty in future instructional activities reports. September 9, 2002 and October 24, 2002 letters from President Atkinson to the chancellors included directives to the Chancellors and Executive Vice Chancellors, still in effect, that require campuses to: • • • • • • • Maintain a file of each department’s instructional activities policies. Routinely submit a copy of each department’s current policy to the Provost and Senior Vice President – Academic Affairs. Review and approve all department policies and any future changes in them, and report those changes to the Provost and Senior Vice President – Academic Affairs. Annually review, by department, reported instructional activities and determine the appropriateness of any discrepancy between the effort reported and the policy that pertains to that department. Review the campus’s recent experience with average class size and, if appropriate, take steps to reverse increases in class size. Develop or review campus policy with regard to instructional release time, submit the policy to the Provost and Senior Vice President – Academic Affairs for review, and implement it. Require that departments must, to justify each new faculty position, submit for the Deans’ and EVC’s review, an analysis of the value of that position not only for research, but also for meeting instructional needs. Continuing UCOP responsibility for oversight of these activities is inherent in these directives. The Task Force on Instructional Activities (IATF) In November 2002, in consultation with the Academic Council Chair, President Atkinson appointed a Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, chaired by former Provost King, to examine the adequacy and equity of instructional responsibilities in the University and to reconsider the ways we define faculty instructional activities and describe them both publicly and to our faculty. The Task Force completed its work in July 2003 and produced two reports: • Describing and Reporting Faculty Instructional Activities, which suggested a new approach to reporting faculty teaching activities in a way that reflects the special features of a research university experience for our students and the different modes of teaching in which our faculty are engaged. The new approach was called TIE (Total Instructional Effort), and it articulated three forms of faculty instruction: FacultyDesigned Instruction, Faculty-Supervised Group Instruction, and Faculty-Supervised Tutorial Instruction. • Faculty Instructional Responsibilities: Guidelines for Departmental Policies, which placed the locus of responsibility for teaching activities clearly on the department as a 25 collective whole and recommended new processes to monitor comparability of efforts within disciplines and strengthen oversight. The Chancellors and the Academic Senate reviewed and commented on the reports. There was support, in principle, for the TIE approach to reporting faculty teaching activity, with concomitant recommendations that the definitions for the proposed reporting categories be clarified, and that there be recognition that the new reporting framework would involve considerable work by faculty and staff to implement. The Implementation Task Force (ITF) In September 2003, Provost King appointed the Implementation Task Force (ITF) to advise him and the Executive Vice Chancellors about the best ways to implement or respond to the IATF’s recommendations, address comments received from the Academic Senate and the campus administrations, and provide oversight for the development and practical assessment of the proposed approach. Having asked his staff to work with campus colleagues to see how the Task Force’s definitions of teaching activity could be operationalized, he asked the Implementation Task Force to review the categorization effort and to work with the campuses to resolve any issues that arose during the review. The ITF had eight in-person meetings, between during 2003-04 and 2004-05. Subgroups also met, and members consulted by telephone and email. The ITF’s work was threefold: 1. Refining the IATF’s proposed course accounting system for describing and reporting faculty instructional activity. During Summer 2003, prior to the first meeting of the ITF, the University’s Institutional Research Directors were asked to pilot test the proposed TIE course accounting system. Five campus IR directors met with five or six academic departments on their respective campuses to discuss the TIE classification proposal and to attempt to assign each of the department’s courses to one of the three categories: Faculty-Designed Instruction, Faculty-Supervised Group Instruction, and Faculty-Supervised Tutorial Instruction3. This work showed that the category definitions did not provide sufficient guidelines to departments. Also, faculty and administrative reactions to the category descriptors were negative, because faculty members consider all courses to be faculty-designed. The conclusion was that the ITF would need to revise the definitions so that they were clear, consistent, comprehensive, and would explicitly capture the types of courses that faculty members had difficulty classifying during the pilot, as well as eliminate the distinction between faculty-designed and faculty-supervised. As a result, the ITF, together with the campus Directors of Institutional Research and staff in the Provost’s Office, refined the proposed accounting system, and developed a 3 The disciplines were: Chemistry and Biochemistry, Studio Art, Electrical Engineering, Political Science, Psychology, and a discipline-of-choice with a large amount of field work (i.e., Psychology and Social Behavior, Earth Sciences, Social Welfare, Anthropology, and Geological Science.) 26 new UC taxonomy of 18 Faculty Instructional Activity types and a framework for placing those instructional types in three equal categories of courses that capture the instructional goals for the UC students who are enrolled. (See Appendix 10 for a complete description.) The new system was also to be called TIE and to refer to Total Instructional Effort. Now, however, category titles were adopted that represented each letter of the acronym and the primary pedagogical purpose of each group of courses: • • • Transmitting the Knowledge Base Initiating Intellectual Independence Emphasizing Independent Inquiry In February 2004, Provost King asked the Executive Vice Chancellors to test this proposal. Each campus asked its departments to classify all General Campus courses into the proposed instruction types, and the Institutional Research offices identified the classes in each type that were offered in 2002-03, using both the old (primary and independent study) and the new (18 instructional activity types) reporting frameworks. After data were submitted to UCOP in April 2004, UCOP staff compiled the system data into each of the 18 types and used the ITF’s guidelines for placing the each of the 18 types into the appropriate TIE category. Review of the results during spring 2004 resulted in general satisfaction that, while not perfect, the system yielded credible class counts and distributions by instructional activity type as well as type of instructor (e.g., regular rank vs. Unit 18) that were consistent with faculty experience. It was also possible to compare the results of the old and new methods. While the new method gives a great deal more information about the ways in which the curriculum is delivered, the two methods yield overall summary results that are comparable and can be explained to external audiences. They will be useful for reporting statistics for the UC system to external constituents. During summer 2004 the ITF asked its staff to examine a few departments in some detail to ascertain whether the data indicate that course types were properly coded according to the activity type definitions and consistently coded across departments and campuses. An extensive analysis of data from Physics was conducted, followed by reviews of Anthropology, Chinese, French and Music. The exercise underscored that while the courses may be accurately categorized according to the 18 course types, there are differences in the way courses in the curriculum are structured and delivered, particularly with regard to how lectures, laboratories, and discussion sections are combined and the number of classes and units associated with each action. Workload statistics across departments and campuses are not necessarily directly comparable. The ITF itself has recommended that the Office of the President should develop comparative data by discipline for UC and comparable institutions. Given the results of this diagnostic exercise, however, the ITF’s conclusion was that data at the specific departmental level should be used with great care. Such data can be useful in facilitating a conversation with a department about its success in meeting workload goals, but the department-level data should not be published or routinely shared 27 among campuses unless they are part of documents and processes that contain explanatory information for each department about how faculty efforts are deployed. 2. Reviewing the IATF’s findings with regard to UC’s comparability with other universities in faculty instructional effort. During the course of its work, the IATF conducted 140 interviews of faculty and department chairs to gather as much information as possible about expected instructional responsibilities at UC and its comparison institutions. That work, described in their July 2003 report,4 underscored the difficulty in obtaining good data about teaching activity at other universities. Overall, however, the information they were able to collect was consistent enough, across departments and campuses, to lead them to the conclusion that, at a policy level the number of classes UC faculty are expected to teach on average is similar to the number expected of faculty at comparable research universities. To supplement the work of the IATF, the ITF asked staff to gather additional data for five departments: Mechanical Engineering, Philosophy, Physics, Business & Management, and Theater/Drama. Staff completed 69 interviews with department chairs at UC and comparison institutions (Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, SUNY-Buffalo, and University of Virginia-Main Campus). Results were consistent with the findings of the IATF. Combined results from both IATF and ITF interviews are shown below. 4 Faculty Instructional Responsibilities: Guidelines for Departmental Policies, Report of the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activities, University of California, July 2003, pp. 4-9 28 Faculty Instructional Expectations Stated by Department Chairs At the University of California and Comparable Universities1 2003-04 Avg. Number of Classes per Academic Year at UC Campuses on Avg. Number of Classes per Academic Year at Comparable Campuses on Semester System Semester System Quarter System Quarter System Social Sciences 3-4 4-5 3-4 4 Humanities and Arts 4 4-5 4 4 Biological and Physical Sciences 2 3 2 2-3 Engineering 3 4 3 2-3 1 Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, SUNY-Buffalo, and University of Virginia-Main Campus 3. Considering issues associated with campus oversight of departmental teaching policies. The ITF carefully considered the recommendations made by the Task Force on Faculty Instructional Activity, as well as the University’s commitments to the state regarding faculty instructional activity that were set forth in letters from former President Atkinson (September 9, 2002 and October 24, 2002). ITF members also considered carefully the conceptual and practical relationships between using the TIE system to categorize and count classes at the campus level, and instructional workload statements developed and managed at the department level. The ITF concluded that TIE is a reporting system, not a set of guidelines either for setting the curriculum or managing teaching activity. Finally, the ITF considered issues associated with developing guidelines for use by departments in establishing their policies for instructional workload, course release, and administrative and research buyout. After careful deliberations, the ITF members agreed that, while department policies must be explicit about normal assigned course loads, general responsibilities for individualized instruction, course release, and other aspects of mounting the teaching program, campuses must have the autonomy to develop campus guidelines for departments that are appropriate for each campus. The ITF members agree that the campus guidelines created by the UCLA Joint Task Force on Departmental Teaching Policies might serve as a useful model for other campuses. (See Appendix 9) The Implementation Task Force’s recommendations can be found in the body of this report. 29