An ongoing and challenging issue for all administrators who have to assign teaching responsibilities is assessing “effort” associated with different types of courses. While it is abundantly clear that different amounts of effort go into lecture classes versus lab classes, we still frequently talk about teaching responsibilities as the “number of classes taught per semester.” In the department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University, we faced this challenge across lecture courses, lab courses and Landscape Architecture studio classes. We undertook a year-long effort to assign “effort” values to each of our classes. In this presentation we will discuss our philosophy and approach to this undertaking, including how we engaged the entire department in the process. We ultimately developed a complex spreadsheet (currently being converted to an interactive database) that assigns points to classes based on number of contact hours, preparation work, service learning or experiential experience, grading/management workload, and class size. We then used this information to determine where additional support, in the form of graduate or undergraduate student TAs or staff, was most needed to create equity across teaching loads. This work is ongoing and needs to be updated annually based on changes in course structures and sizes and teaching assignments. In this presentation, we will share the database we created to make annual updates easy and transparent to everyone in the department.
