Memorial University
A better way to manage faculty workload and compensation
Integrating systems boosts efficiency and saves money.
Our initiative has had tremendous success with students, faculty, and staff.
Cheryl Whitten
Associate Director of Financial and Administrative Services, Memorial University
Challenge
Eliminate redundant data and streamline the faculty workload and compensation process
Results
- Streamlined approval processes and improved data quality
- Increased efficiencies for staff, saving an estimated 230 hours per semester
- Improved collaboration among campus departments
Summary
The Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador employs around 1,300 full- and part-time faculty. In addition to regular teaching loads, each academic unit has teaching equivalency frameworks, prescribed by the faculty collective agreement, that determine recognition and compensation for all non-standard teaching (such as graduate supervision, field placement supervision, and so on). These teaching equivalencies vary substantially—even across departments within the same faculty—and have a large impact on faculty workloads. In order to manage the complexities of handling faculty workload and compensation, the university needed an automated system to help make the job easier.
Memorial had an existing home-grown, customized system in place for approving sessional instructors and overload assignments, but it required substantial manual intervention, with data being maintained in multiple systems. The university elected to tackle the problem by integrating its data and campus systems, eliminating redundancies, and streamlining the process from top to bottom.
