A credit hour (cr) is the equivalent of 3 normal faculty workdays (fwd) for the purpose of tracking overload. 1 cr = 3 fwd
The full-time faculty workload at Kentucky State University has traditionally been measured in credit hours for course instruction or administrative release and in workdays for various aspects of faculty service and overload. Both credit hours and workdays relate to approximations of faculty time spent working in a semester or contract period. These approximations of time (whether hours or workdays) are predicated on the relationship between course credit hours and time spent in academic engagement with students during a semester, which is a minimum of 15 weeks of academic engagement in a semester.
Relating faculty workload to time spent working is unavoidable to an extent because of the credit hour system. However, one weakness of this relationship is the potential to convey an association between faculty work hours and compensation inadvertently. This is undesirable since neither full-time nor part-time adjunct faculty are classified as non-exempt, hourly employees. So, it is helpful to disjoin workload from working time by implementing an atemporal metric to quantify faculty workload. Additionally, the older methods of tracking faculty workload do not readily lend themselves to various conversions, such as determining the workload represented by non-credit-bearing work or projects paid at a flat rate.
Building upon the traditional approaches to faculty workload at Kentucky State University, KYSU Online will use a new model to track faculty workload based on faculty workload units (abbreviated as WLU). Faculty workload units (WLU) facilitate compensation; they are not directly tied to course instruction (as are credit hours), and they disjoin compensation from time-based approximations of faculty work (such as workdays and work hours). Faculty workload units (WLU) meet the needs of KYSU Online by accommodating different faculty types (full-time and part-time), different types of work (e.g., instructional, non-instructional, special assignments), different units of quantifying the work (e.g., credit hours, workdays, flat rate stipends), different timeframes in which the work is completed (e.g., semester, subterm), and different purposes for tracking the work (e.g., monitoring overload caps, additional pay, adjunct benefits thresholds).
Adjunct faculty are considered part-time employees of the University.3 The Office of Online Education assigns online course load to adjunct faculty as needed. As much as possible, course load assignments consider the requests and preferences of each adjunct faculty member. In some circumstances, an adjunct faculty member might be asked to complete additional duties beyond the scope of their part-time teaching load, such as administrative support of the online programs, service as an SME, or curricular assessment. The Office of Online Education tracks other assigned duties.
Adjunct faculty are not hourly employees of the University. They are paid a flat rate per course and other duties. However, to comply with regulations relevant to the part-time status of adjunct faculty members and benefits administration, the university will use adjunct faculty workload information to track adjunct hours of service.
3 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/part-54#p-54.4980H-1(a)(32)