the MAW of HEFCE

Prof. Peter Barrett writes in the 27 May TES about a HEFCE-funded project on Managing Academic Workload, led by him and Lucinda Barrett at the University of Salford and involving 20 partner institutions.  The project has recently published a report; "Management of Academic Workloads: Improving Practice in the Sector".

It is interesting to see such a rich analysis of the benefits of 'confidently transparent' workload allocation and of being 'roughly right not precisely wrong'.  Also notable is that despite having developed an institution-wide system, the report nevertheless affirms the importance of leaving workload allocation decisions in the hands of departments, in whose management staff are more generally willing to place some trust.

MAW has open-sourced a spreadsheet-based system originally developed by Prof. Barrett and now used by all departments at Salford University.