HIED 850: Discussion Posts

Introduction

For students currently employed at an institution for higher education:

What is your position at your institution and how often do you interact with faculty and/or related personnel? What faculty issues affect your work at your institution?

For students currently not employed at an institution for higher education:

 

Think about the type of job that you hope to obtain at a college or university. How often do you think that position would interact with faculty and/or related personnel? In what ways do you envision that interaction occurring?

Currently, I am a high school science teacher. In the future, I hope to obtain a job within international student services or work in the field of institutional research for program prioritization or departmental assessment. Either of these positions would include a large amount of faculty and related personnel interaction.

Working with program prioritization would include interacting with members of faculty from each department and program to gather data and construct a narrative reflective of how the program advances the institutional mission. Of course, at the beginning of my time working within higher education institutional research, I would likely mainly interact with the faculty within my department as I learn from them. I expect some faculty will be resistant to prioritization due to a lack of comfort and understanding of the process. This will likely present some difficult interactions.

Working within international student affairs, I will likely be in contact with faculty who teach international students, staff who work within housing, and faculty at other institutions who partner with my institution in sending and receiving students participating in study abroad. Interactions with local faculty and staff will likely be through emails or phone calls or in-person if the situation is urgent. I am sure some issues will arise in these interactions such as faculty miscommunications with international students in their classes. Miscommunication between faculty and related personnel at other institutions is also likely because we will not be meeting in person most of the time.

I look forward to learning more about the types of interactions I can expect in either of these roles.

 

Trends

Consider an institution you know about or have been associated with, what trends — either those presented in this lesson or one of your own choosing — have had an impact on how faculty and related personnel accomplish their various jobs? Describe how these trends may need to be accounted for in terms of studies of faculty and related personnel workload and productivity. You do not need to have definitive answers now, but consider how these trends may affect any analyses run by an institutional research office or department about their faculty and related personnel.

Offer your input and respond thoughtfully to your classmates’ comments.

I will focus on North Carolina State University (NC State) and the broader trend of “changes in government funding for higher education” which has declined significantly in recent years (Frye, 2017, p. 28). In fact, NC State receives 32% of its revenue from state appropriations and only 2% of revenue from federal appropriations (NC State, 2021). The national public average of a state institution’s federal appropriations, grants, and contracts is 13.6%, so 2% is substantially below this amount (Goldstein, 2019). NC State does have a large amount of revenue from contracts and grants (22%) as well as sales and services (14%) which seem to compensate for this deficit (NC State, 2021).

Rather than seeking to decrease the number of faculty and staff employed, it seems NC State is working to preserve them through increasing projected operational expenditures that support the university faculty and staff by $10 million (NC State, 2021). These resource allocation decisions indicate a desire to support the institution’s employees. I am surprised by this finding because the institution does not hire many part-time faculty or contingent faculty in a “cost-saving strategy” when facing financial limitations (Frye, 2017, p. 29).

In terms of faculty work productivity, NC State seems to be a stable job with room to advance professionally due to a large amount of full-time, tenured, and tenure-track faculty. The institution seems to be investing in their employees in a good-faith effort to increase institutional and student success rather than choosing more immediate cost-saving strategies through firing faculty and hiring part-time staff.

In the future, I expect to see questions raised about college spending on faculty, specifically because NC State has a large amount of tenure and tenure-track faculty (Frye, 2017). For now, it seems like the university is supporting its staff despite growing financial pressures from decreasing federal support and the financial drain that the pandemic will likely continue having on higher education institutions. This decision might be questioned if faculty productivity begins to fall as institutional researches review data related to their faculty and personnel.

References:
Frye, J.R. (2017, Winter). Organizational pressures driving the growth of contingent faculty. New Directions in Institutional Research, 2017 (176), pp. 27-40. https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/doi/pdf/10.1002/ir.20242
Goldstein, L. (2019). College and University Budgeting: A guide for academics and other stakeholders. National Association of College and University Business Officers. ISBN 9781569720257.
North Carolina State University. (2021, January 22). Fiscal year 2020-21 budget, fiscal years 2017-18 through 2019-20 actual expenditures. https://budget.ncsu.edu/budgetcentral/documents/Brochure.pdf.

IPEDS and Faculty/Staff Data

For this assignment you will be using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Links to an external site.) (IPEDS) website to find data related to faculty and related personnel. If you are unfamiliar with IPEDS, spend some time familiarizing yourself with the available data. 

After looking through IPEDS data and the various tools and tables that are available, provide your reactions as a discussion post.

Is IPEDS a resource that you have used previously? What are some of the limitations of IPEDS data vis-a-vis faculty and staff at postsecondary institutions? What do you see as beneficial when using IPEDS data? Consider that many analyses about an institution’s faculty and related personnel will be run based on institutionally-available data, how can IPEDS data inform and provide corollary information?

IPEDS is a resource I have used previously in several classes for projects. My experience with it is still limited. I mostly have used it to gather data on comparison institutions of the institution I am interested in. I have not yet run into data limitations with the database because it has always offered more data than I need. However, the interface of IPEDS is not very user-friendly, so I find myself re-learning how to use it because I only use it once or twice a semester. It could be updated to have more obvious buttons to get the results the user is looking for.

That being said, there are some comprehensive tutorials online that are very useful in remembering how to use the software. The most beneficial part of using IPEDS is the variety of data and the ease that institutional data can be compared. One of my favorite tutorials included a spreadsheet that listed all of the private institution’s IPEDS code in a comma-separated format so I can compare all of the private institutions in my state or in the country with a simple “copy and paste” function. This will likely be incredibly valuable in the future when comparisons to other institutions are necessary. It also seems like the data that is available in IPEDS will be accurate because national grant decisions depend on the data submitted.

PEDS data can inform and provide corollary information that is particularly helpful to strategic financial planning because it is such a large data set. Various institutions can be selected that are aspirational, meeting the same institutional goals, or at nt meeting institutional goals compared to the institution I am working for. This data could then be used to build a predictive model or a benchmarking report to provide guidance to the department or to address whatever concern we are searching for data to support our choices (corollary information). IPEDS also provides a lot of data that could be relevant for identifying the financial viability of an institution and where changes could be made to make the institution more financially successful.
Reference
[Collage Viability]. 2021, February 27. IPEDS data – IPEDS skills for beginners. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJhzFovxk3k&t=2s.

 

Unbundling the Faculty Role

Overview

As detailed on the Unbundling the Faculty Role page in this lesson, there are a variety of activities that comprise instruction as we know it. In this discussion, we will build off of that list of those activities to explore who can/should complete those activities. Moreover, how would those individuals complete the activities. 

 Instructions for Initial Post

To complete the assignment:

  1. Open a copy of Table of Instructional Activities Download Table of Instructional Activities. This spreadsheet includes a listing of many of the instructional activities as well as additional columns for further classification.
  2. Review the list of instructional activities.
    • Add any activities that you feel are missing.
    • If an individual instructional activity needs to be divided into even more discrete activities, add those to the list as well.
  3. Then, for each listed individual instructional activity, select which entity(ies) can/should accomplish that activity in a college or university setting, (e.g. add an “X” in the space provided for each applicable column, etc.).
  4. Once you have completed your activity list and associated categorization, you will be including your completed table as part of your initial post.
  5. You should also provide a rationale to support your categorization. If you added additional activities, provide a description of that activity including how it is different and why it should be done as part of the instructional role. 
  6. Your rationale should also include if you feel this is a marked change from the instructional role as it currently exists in colleges and universities across the United States.

Follow-Up Posts

Once you have completed your initial post, take time to review the posts of other students. Are your categorizations the same? Different? If the categorizations are the same, consider the rationale, are they the same as well? If your categorizations are different, engage one another in a dialog to gain insight into each other’s perspective.

Based on the categorizations that you have made, how would faculty workload and productivity measures be effected? Pay particular attention to any activities that you would assign to technology and/or third party providers fulfill instructional activities. How would that impact measurement?

Colbeck (2002) describes teaching as, “the processes of preparation, classroom instruction, grading, and advising; products such as new courses developed or ratings of instructional effectiveness, or as a college or university goal” (p. 43). So my rationale for categorizing duties largely relies on this definition. If an instructional faculty member had infinite time and energy, then they could complete all of these activities, but since that is impossible, I have selected multiple boxes for each category with the assumption that the institution is in “unbundling historical era IV” so teaching faculty and research faculty are unbundled and instructional faculty are only responsible for instruction (Gehrke & Kezar, 2015, p. 98).  

Overall, I do not feel my categorization is a marked change from the instructional role as it currently exists other than the assumption that teaching faculty and research faculty are truly unbundled. I do not think teaching faculty are truly only focused on teaching at this time because they are likely required to be responsible for all of the listed teaching and service duties. 

Developing curriculum; Writing content for curriculum; Selecting learning artifacts

Curriculum development is sometimes misconstrued as being an instructor’s responsibility, however, it is a unique position compared to teaching. A curriculum developer, “helps a school develop and implement a teaching plan with lessons designed to meet the educational standards of the school or district…involving all aspects of instruction, from the textbooks to the teaching methods” (Zip Recruiter, n.d., para. 1). This is an activity that should be handled by related personnel or a third-party provider rather than a teaching faculty member because it requires specific skills and expertise outside of the scope of teaching. An exception to this suggestion would be a teaching faculty member who is not currently teaching courses but rather focusing their attention on developing a suitable curriculum within their department. The instructional faculty member responsible for delivering content should have the autonomy to select learning artifacts when they deem it necessary.

Determining which assessments to use

A curriculum developer can suggest what type of assessments could be used to evaluate specific goals that are suggested in their curriculum, especially if that curriculum is designed to prepare a student for an external assessment such as the MCAT or other entrance exams. The final decision regarding what assessment to use should come from the faculty member who is teaching the course. This type of autonomy is important when determining how the content will be delivered because assessments and content delivery are not mutually exclusive. If, for example, a course is largely assessed through performance but the content delivery is focused on simple recollection, then the students will not be adequately prepared for the assessments and are likely to underperform.

Delivering Content

The faculty member responsible for teaching the class should also be responsible for how the content is delivered. Many faculty members consider designing powerpoints and other lecture materials to be time-consuming and burdensome but worthwhile when they plan to teach the same course multiple times. Many also consider content delivery to be deeply personal so they do not like to share delivery materials or use colleagues’ materials. Technology can be incredibly helpful in delivering content through uploading lessons to an online platform like canvas or flipping a classroom. So, delivering content and the materials associated with teaching should be the faculty member’s responsibility

Answering Questions

(General)

Many students first turn to online search engines or “youtube university” to answer their academic questions. So, technology is responsible for resolving many questions. Of course, faculty members and related personnel should also be accessible to answer questions through designated forums or office hours. Third-party providers can also be provided through an on-campus tutoring center or other tutoring services.

(Straightforward based on the syllabus or institutional/departmental policy)

Questions based on the syllabus or institutional/departmental policy should be answered by a faculty member who is the student’s academic advisor or a departmental leader. These faculty members will likely know the answers to any questions regarding these topics while an instructional faculty member may not be able to provide explanations.

(Complex sense-making of subject matter)

Instructional faculty members or related personnel like a teaching assistant should be responsible for complex subject matter questions. These questions are likely highly specified to the course being taken and the information that is relevant to the curriculum or assessments. Therefore, specified knowledge will be required to answer these concerns.

Facilitating learning, coordinating discussions

The faculty member who is the instructor or related personnel should both facilitate learning and coordinate discussions through class activities, homework assignments, group projects, lectures, office hours, and assessments. These two categories are integral to effective content delivery, so those in charge of content delivery should also be in charge of facilitating learning and coordinating discussions.

Assessing Learning

Learning should be assessed within a class through projects, hands-on activities, performances, tests, quizzes, papers, discussions, or a variety of other methods. Faculty or related personnel who are in charge of content delivery should also be responsible for designing and facilitating the assessment of that content. In large classes, technology is especially helpful to ensure participation and honesty when giving assessments. This may be done through third-party services such as examity.com or other testing companies if an external exam is one of the course objectives.

Grading Assessments

The mark scheme for grading assessments should be completed by the faculty member who created the assessment. The actual grading of assessments based on this mark-scheme could be completed by related personnel such as graduate student assistants or technology like turnitin.com. Unless the assessment is an external exam like the MCAT, a third-party company should not be necessary.

 

References:

 

Colbeck, C.L. (2002, Summer). Integration: Evaluating faculty work as a whole. New Directions in Institutional Research, 2002(114), pp.43-52. 

Gehrke, S., & Kezar, A. (2015). Unbundling the faculty role in higher education: Utilizing historical, theoretical, and empirical frameworks to inform future research. In M.B. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research 30 (pp. 93-150). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

ZipRecruiter. (n.d.). What Does a Curriculum Developer Do. Ziprecruiter.com. https://www.ziprecruiter.com/e/What-Does-a-Curriculum-Developer-Do.

 

Faculty Interview

Interview

For this assignment you are tasked with interviewing a faculty member using the following guideline to select the “type” of faculty member you will interview:

  • Your last name begins with A through G: Tenure-track faculty member
  • Your last name begins with H through M: Adjunct faculty member
  • Your last name begins with N through S: Teaching focused faculty member at a community college or smaller four-year institution
  • Your last name begins with T through Z: Research focused faculty member.

Because the focus of this course is faculty and related personnel in terms of their work lives and what influences them, here are some suggested questions to ask the faculty member you interview:

  • Where is your faculty member “located” within their institution? (Suggestion: read this week’s lesson before you do your interview.)
  • What do they do in a typical week? Have them describe what they do.
  • Approximately how many hours in a week do they spend on teaching and teaching-related activities, research and research-related activities, and service?
  • Is there ever a “slow time” for them during a typical calendar year? When is that time?
  • Generally, how are they paid: on a per-class basis, a yearly contract, a 9/10-month contract, etc.? What are the benefits and pitfalls of this type of employment?
  • Who do they most identify with? Their professional discipline, their department, or their institution? Why?
  • What is the importance of shared governance to what they do as a faculty member?

Initial Post

After you complete your interview, add your findings in the Lesson 4 Faculty Interview Summary (Links to an external site.). Keep in mind that this is a collaborative document. If a different student already posted one of your findings under your “faculty type” you are not required to duplicate their results.

What surprised you about what your faculty member had to say?   

Follow-Up Posts 

For follow-up posts, review the Lesson 4 Faculty Interview Summary document (Links to an external site.). What similarities and differences do you note across faculty types? Do you share in your classmate’s surprise over what they learned from their interviews? How might these similarities and differences inform future studies of faculty and related personnel?

I interviewed a computer science instructor at the Air Force Academy who is also a an officer in the Air Force. From our discussion, it seemed he was an adjunct teacher but held a different title because of the structure of the Academy. I also enjoyed my interview very much because I have not had the opportunity to learn much about the academic structure at a military service academy. I particularly enjoyed learning about the class schedules for the students which change week to week depending on the other activities they are required to participate in. For example, the junior-level computer science class my interviewee taught meets either 2 or 3 times per week depending on the other activities the upperclassmen are required to participate in.

Some similarities I noticed is that we each interviewed a full-time employee with nearly no research duties and full benefits. I was very surprised to see that each of my classmates interviewed instructors who do not feel their job is secure and that they could be terminated fairly easily. My interviewee felt his job was completely secure, but he had to sacrifice higher “civilian pay” for this security. My interviewee also different in that he related most to the Air Force Academy and his position as an Air Force officer rather than his computer science department or discipline. Another surprise for me was seeing how the instructors interviewed did not feel invested in the participating in shared governance or concerned that they were not allowed to do so with the exception of Scott’s interviewee. I always thought that instructors would find this to be incredibly important, so that was a big surprise. This could be related to the non-tenure status of each of our interviewees and it aligns with the statement that “No one has good data on how many faculty members working off the tenure track are included in faculty governance” ( Jones et al., 2017, p. 506). Going forward in the class, I hope to learn more about how non-tenure track faculty are involved in governance and now, if they even hope to be involved. 

Reference:

Jones, W. A., Hutchens, N. H., Hulbert, A., Lewis, W. D., & Brown, D. M.(2017). Shared governance among the new majority: Non-tenure track faculty eligibility for election to university faculty senates http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10755-017-9402-2. Innovative Higher Education, 42, 505-519.

 

Pro's and Con's of Stock-and-Flow Analyses

For this discussion, I would like for you to focus on the pros and cons of stock-and-flow analyses within the higher education setting. This forum will also serve as a vehicle for conversation as you progress through your collaborative written assignment this week. For those of you who have completed this type of analysis in your place of work, I would encourage you to share your first-hand experiences and insights.

Some thought questions to get you started:

  • What do you think is most useful about stock-and-flow analyses in the higher education setting?
  • How have you seen these types of analyses used to best practice?
  • What pitfalls, if any, should be planned for and avoided?

I have not personally conducted a stock-and-flow analysis in a higher education setting but from the reading and our discussion in the synchronous session it seems the most useful part of this kind of analysis is its potential use in predictive studies for recruitment, retirement, and resource allocation. It seems using this type of analysis for best practice allows administration to hire staff that are more likely to be retained over several years. This supports continuity and stability within departments. It also helps the institution gain an overall sense of their employees work pathway which could help them in predicting many aspects of planning.

It is always useful to have an idea of how many and how long employees are likely to be around, but Vince’s discussion about conducting a study to identify why allied health classes are a huge source of expenditure while their enrollment numbers are dropping made me really consider how practical stock and flow analysis can be. As faculty salaries and benefits account for one of the biggest expenditures in higher education, administrators must know how many teaching and non-teaching staff are employed in the program and how long they are likely to be retained. For example, at NC State 63%  of yearly expenditures are used on Salaries and Benefits (NC State, 2021). If costs must be cut in a program, unfortunately, trimming down staff members seems to be the most efficient option.

The biggest barrier to using stock-and-flow analysis seems to be access to information. Not every administrator, even those in the institutional research department, has access to the information that would help them conduct a thorough analysis. Often access is limited due to privacy reasons, but it certainly seems to make conducting an accurate study more difficult.

 

NC State. (2021, January 22). Fiscal year 2020-21 budget. https://budget.ncsu.edu/budgetcentral/

Salary Studies and Salary-Equity Analyses

For this discussion, I would like for you to focus on salary studies and salary-equity analyses within the higher education setting. This forum will also serve as a vehicle for conversation as you progress through your collaborative written assignment this week. For those of you who have completed this type of analysis in your place of work, I would encourage you to share your first-hand experiences and insights.

Some thought questions to get you started:

  • What do you think is most useful about salary studies in the higher education setting?
  • How have you seen these types of analyses used to best practice?
  • How might analyses such as these be mis-used or mis-construed?
  • What pitfalls, if any, should be planned for and avoided?

Employee’s base salary and “fringe benefits such as health care and retirement” are one of the largest expenditures of a higher education institution (Toutkoushian & Kramer II, 2012, p. 573). So, salary studies are vital to ensure that your institution is offering equitable wages that are low enough to be sustainable for the institution but high enough to retain their qualified employees. Internal salary studies should be conducted to ensure faculty and staff are treated equitably based on their position and qualifications. These studies should then be compared to peer institutions through external salary equity studies to determine if the wages at your (the IR professional’s) institution are competitive enough to retain faculty (Toutkoushian & Kramer II, 2012).

Salary studies and salary-equity analyses can be used to support best practices because they can provide information on the driving component for employee retention for any job – competitive compensation. According to Dr. George Kuh, student interaction with a faculty member is a high-impact practice that has a positive effect on student retention and student experience (Kuh, 2008). Faculty with career stability and longevity at one institution will likely invest in their departments and their students more than a faculty member who is not planning to be at that institution long term. Therefore, it is likely that student-faculty interaction will be increased when faculty can be retained.

These types of analyses are sensitive because they have to do with salaries. With increasing conversation regarding gender and racial equality and subsequent wage gaps, salary-equity analyses could likely expose injustices that should be addressed when found. However, institutions are experiencing financial hardships due to inflation, COVID-19, and political changes (citation). So, addressing financial inequities could put a financial strain on already struggling institutions. On the other hand, not addressing financial inequities could invite scandal and criticism – especially if the inequities are found to be occurring within vulnerable populations.

Public scandals should be anticipated and avoided through conducting salary studies with discretion. Of course, data sources like the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System are public resources where professionals within the field could find this information on their own if they searched for it, so institutional researchers should conduct these studies routinely to identify possible complaints when contracts are up for negotiation (Toutkoushian & Kramer II, 2012). Researchers should also be aware that “studies may be initiated in response to a legal claim by one or more faculty of inequitable treatment in pay”, so a researcher’s methodology must be carefully conducted so it can withstand the analysis of possible litigation (Toutkoushian & Kramer II, 2012, p. 589).

References

Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Toutkoushian, R. K., & Kramer II, D. A. (2012). Analyzing equity in faculty compensation (Links to an external site.).  In Howard, R. D., McLaughlin, G. W., Knight, W. E., & Associates, The Handbook of Institutional Research (pp. 573-593). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. (Note, this link will take you to the online e-Book. You will need to navigate to the correct chapter, Part IV, Chapter 32).

Perspectives on Faculty Studies

Initial Post

For this discussion, you will be conducting an interview to gather insights and perspectives on faculty and related personnel studies.

Interview Details

Option 1: Faculty and/or Staff Perspective

  • For students already working in the Institutional Research (IR) field, you will be tasked with interviewing an administrator or a faculty member, i.e. a recipient of one of the studies you or an IR colleague has produced.

Option 2: Institutional Research Perspective

  • For students not working in the field of Institutional Research (IR), you will be tasked with interviewing an IR professional, i.e. a person gathering, analyzing, and reporting data on faculty and related personnel.

Keep in mind that the individual you select to interview should be involved with a completed or in progress study about faculty and/or related personnel (either conducting the study or receiving the results).

Interview Questions

Depending on the individual you select to interview, you may need to ask different questions. Consider the examples below:

  • Option 1 Questions:
    • How did the faculty and/or related staff member learn of the IR study?
    • How did the faculty and/or related staff member obtain/receive the results of the study?
    • How did the results (intended or known) inform decision-making from the faculty and/or related staff perspective?
    • Did the study (or will the study) inform the presenting problem? How?
  • Option 2 Questions:
    • To which of the broad categories of studies does their study belong?
    • What was the “presenting problem” that led to the study being conducted?
    • On which role groups did the study focus?
    • What variables were used?
    • Where did they find data for their analyses?
    • What types of statistical analysis did they do? 

Based on your interview, you will draft an initial post that includes the following:

  • A short description of the study that the two of you discussed.
  • For completed studies, what impact did the study have? What evidence of change as a result of the study is or will be available?
  • For studies under way, what impact do they hope the study will have? What evidence of change are they anticipating?

Follow-Up Posts

Once you have uploaded your initial post, take time to read and consider the postings from your fellow students. How similar/different were the perspectives of faculty and IR professionals? If you are in an IR position, how did the perspective of the faculty and/or administrator you interviewed influence you? If you are not in IR and interviewed an IR professional, how did their perspective influence you? 

In addition, your follow-up posts should also contain any remaining questions/comments that you have about the studies that have been described by your classmates. 

I had the pleasure of interviewing the associate vice provost for of IR studies at Penn State and a research associate in charge of faculty studies at Penn State. We discussed two recent studies they completed. First, we discussed a 2018-2020 faculty exit study which is an anonymous, voluntary study that about 25% response rate. Findings showed that more people chose to retire right after COVID began, while there were not a lot of retirements between 2018-2020 likely due to a voluntary retirement program in 2016-2017 that many took advantage of. She does not know what change may come from this study, but she said “it is interesting to see that people are doing this and that and they’re mostly at this location (because we have 24 locations, these are where trends most often emerge). Other than analyzing the interviews, she needed to use a lot of t-tests because pre-COVID and post-COVID responses showed big variations in faculty satisfaction. She said, “the faculty are unhappy, but there is no unit involved higher-up that could change as a result of this, so maybe the exit survey can be expanded to include all employees [not just faculty] because they leave for reasons too”. This might give the administrators a better idea of how to improve policies and satisfaction.

Then we discussed the annual study of a 10-year flow report for tenure-track faculty – this year from the 2014 cohort – looking for misalignment between responses from committee decisions, dean decisions, and university decisions for granting tenure. The study also evaluated how long tenure is taking to achieve. She found that now, more people are taking two “stays” but in the past it was very rare for people to take more than one “stay”. This is likely due to a COVID-Extension that allows anyone on the tenure path during 2020 to take a one year extension with no penalty. There were over 300 people who took this extra stay with many of them being in the medical field of study. She found that a lower percent of women than expected have achieved tenure (about 66%) but she could not thoroughly evaluate possible causation because the definition for “stay for family/health/maternity – which has huge interactions with gender – is not the same every year” so she couldn’t really use that.

She aims to improve data collection methods in the future, and would love to begin exploring AI options for analyzing interviews because she thinks they could offer more insight into patterns. Overall, the reports are given to a faculty committee to inform their decisions in crafting policies for tenure stays and concessions, what should be considered when going up for tenure, language used in the interviews, and how [faculty] should treat the stay”.

I learned so much from this interview, and I was fortunate enough to be given the report we were discussing. It was interesting to see how both studies relied more heavily on “counts” rather than “sexy analytics”. I also found the graphs, charts, and other visualizations to be clear and intuitive. This seemed to be the most similar part of my interview compared to my peers. The data is presented in a way that anyone can understand it, but the methods are explicitly explained for those who want to see them.

One last note not related to the prompt – My favorite part of the interview was discussing the practical aspects of the study – what caused her unexpected headaches and what she enjoyed. It was exciting to talk to someone who was thrilled by the possibilities of exploring the data she collected in new ways and how the “analysis she played with” gave her the chance to “feel like she was in college again and do some advanced statistics to see emerging patterns [from COVID-related data]”. I enjoy working with data but I also enjoy exploring the data and identifying possibilities for future studies, so this enthusiastic side note made me look forward to learning more.

Personnel Workload and Productivity Studies

For this discussion, I would like for you to focus on faculty and related personnel workload and productivity studies within the higher education setting. This forum will also serve as a vehicle for conversation as you progress through your collaborative written assignment this week. For those of you who have completed this type of analysis in your place of work, I would encourage you to share your first-hand experiences and insights.
Some thought questions to get you started:
• How have you seen workload and time analysis studies used within colleges or universities?
• What are the complexities and limitations of productivity studies compared to workload studies?
• How might analyses such as these be mis-used or mis-construed?

How have you seen workload and time analysis studies used within colleges or universities?

A recent, ongoing study by Kenny & Flunk (2021) aims to develop a set of guiding principles to evaluate the allocation of academic work in universities through conducting a literature review of the “lived experiences of 2526 Australian academics” (p. 1) from survey data collected from an open-ended questionnaire. This study is responding to yearly “reductions in government funding [which] have caused universities to become more competitive and entrepreneurial” (Kenny & Flunk, 2021, p. 1). Before a workload and time analysis study can be utilized to assess if institutional resources are being used wisely, a framework of guiding principles must be developed that can accurately assess faculty productivity and efficiency (Kenny & Flunk, 2021). The guiding principles aim to increase collaboration between upper administration and faculty members, preserve faculty autonomy, increase faculty productivity, and encourage faculty involvement in institutional decision-making (Kenny & Flunk, 2021). These lofty goals are informed by the respondents’ opinions regarding how their time and workload should be analyzed. This provides insights into what practices faculty members – as opposed to the opinions of “top-down corporate approaches” (p. 2) – view as productive uses of faculty time (Kenny & Flunk, 2021).

What are the complexities and limitations of productivity studies compared to workload studies?

First, productivity is the “rate of output per unit of input” (PSU World Campus, n.d. p. 1) as it “relates to the core-purpose of an organization involv[ing] value judgments about what should be done” (Kenny & Flunk, 2021, p. 2). So, defining the variables that these studies are measuring is incredibly complex. Second, the study’s data is limited to self-reported data from surveys or other non-specific assessment measures that may not accurately evaluate a faculty member’s productivity in terms of prestige or complexity. So, measuring productivity seems to be subjective and dependent on a faculty member’s contribution to their department or the institutional mission. Finally, multi-institution or multiple country workload studies are limited in comparing productivity because, for example, the hours spent weekly completing duties (teaching/research/administrative duties/service/other) vary drastically among faculty positions and rank (Bentley & Kyvik, 2012).

How might analyses such as these be mis-used or mis-construed?

If the methodology is limited by ambiguous definitions of productivity or difficult to compare variables, the results of a study could be mis-construed or mis-used. Additionally, if the scope of the study is created to increase productivity and efficiency, but the faculty perceptions of productivity and efficiency do not match the administration’s perceptions, the results will likely not accurately reflect how faculty spend their time.

References: 

Bentley, P. J., & Kyvik, S. (2012). Academic work from a comparative perspective: A survey of faculty working time across 13 countries. Higher Education, 63(4), 529-547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-01109457-4 (Links to an external site.)

Kenny, J., & Flunk, A. E. (2021). Emerging principles for the allocation of academic work in universities. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00747-y (Links to an external site.)

PSU World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 10: National influences on faculty and related personnel. In HIED 850 Canvas: Spring 2022. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2156540/modules/items/34055292

 

Course Reflection

In addition to your paper described above.

Identify the most relevant fact/concept that you identified in your scan of the literature. Then post that information in this discussion forum. In the subject line of the forum, please make sure to include your specialty area of focus. The body of the post should include information related to the following questions:

  • What about this will inform the practice of academic advising?
  • Why should other advisers be aware of the information?
  • How might it effect current advising practice?

**Response to Follow**