assumptions used in credit hour and time-based faculty workload calculations at Kentucky State University.
| Quantity | Unit | Formula / Explanation |
|---|
| 1 | Semester | = 15 semester weeks of academic engagement.28 |
| 1 | Credit hour | = 1 hour of instruction AND 1 hour of grading/preparation PER semester week FOR 15 semester weeks. This equals 30 faculty work hours per credit. |
| 1 | Faculty workday | = 10 faculty work hours. |
| 1 | Credit hour | = 3 normal faculty workdays for the purposes of tracking overload. |
| 1 | Credit hour | = 900 overload/adjunct compensation, up to 2700 per course apart from summer incentive compensation for residential courses. |
| 1 | Credit hour | For full-time faculty, office hours are triggered for residential courses at a rate of 2/3 faculty office hours PER credit hour PER semester week in addition to the hours of instruction and grading/preparation. |
Relating faculty workload to time spent working is unavoidable to an extent because of the credit hour system. One weakness of this relationship, however, is the potential to convey-inadvertently convey an association between faculty work hours and compensation. 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 time spent working by implementing an atemporal metric to quantify faculty workload. Additionally, the assumptions and system of calculations in the table above 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.
Therefore, building upon the historical approaches to faculty workload at Kentucky State University, this section details KYSU Online’s standard unit of tracking faculty workload: 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, overload pay, adjunct benefits thresholds). The remainder of this section explains KYSU Online’s use of faculty workload units.
KYSU Online will measure faculty workload in faculty workload units (WLU). Faculty workload units are a single way to quantify various types of faculty workload. The table below shows how
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