A project focused on monitoring the workload of teachers in training, aiming to assist department heads and the Department of Training Programs in optimizing the distribution of this workload.

Your mission is to prototype a decision-support information system that IMT Atlantique would like to use as part of the new information system for the Pass training program.

Context

IMT Atlantique is both a general engineering grande école, administered by the French Ministry of Industry and Digital Affairs, and a leading research center. IMT Atlantique was created as a result of the merger of Mines Nantes and Télécom Bretagne, and provides a unique, multi-site, general engineering course (recruitment based on the joint Mines-Pont competitive exam), in addition to other study programs: master’s and post-master’s (mastères) degrees, apprenticeship-based engineering courses, and doctoral programs.

The institution, operating on three campuses, hosts 1,800 students, 700 of whom graduate each year. It has 750 staff, including 260 teaching and research staff (enseignants-chercheurs) and permanent researchers producing 850 publications per year. Its €73 M operating budget includes €27 M of own capital with €24 M from research contracts.

IMT Atlantique is organized into directorates (directions), which are responsible for the operational management of the institution, and departments (départements), to which the teaching and research staff are assigned. The instructing party for this assignment is the Directorate of Studies and Academic Life (DFVS - Direction des formations et de la vie scolaire), but the targeted final users are heads of department (HOD) (chefs de département) and their assistant HODs in charge of courses (adjoints au chef de département en charge de l’enseignement).

One problem encountered by departments is managing the workload of their teaching and research staff (EC - enseignants-chercheurs), which must be adapted to the latter’s career plans while enabling the optimal delivery of the different programs.

The management of this workload informs many decisions: recruitment of teaching and research staff, insourcing/outsourcing of activities, creation/cancellation of courses in order to strike the right balance between research and training while continuously improving the quality of the study programs.

Description of the institution’s operations

The information in this section has been compiled in order to provide an overview of the operation of IMT Atlantique in relation to the study programs.

Study programs

The data provided concerns the following programs run by IMT Atlantique:

Stakeholders

The two main stakeholders in this project are the Directorate of Studies and Academic Life (DFVS - Direction des formations et de la vie scolaire) and the departments.

The Directorate of Studies and Academic Life (DFVS) is in contact with the majority of IMT Atlantique’s staff (click here for the organization chart). More specifically, it interacts with the functional directorates and the departments. DFVS staff (or those posted on assignment to the DFVS) manage study tracks, covering a family of study programs: Master of Science in Engineering (FISE: a single program with very high student numbers), Engineering Degree Apprenticeships (FISA: 3 programs), Master’s Degree programs (DNM / MSc: a dozen), Specialized Post-Master’s Degrees (MS: five programs).

The departments are the main contributors to the study program. Discussions, involving the assistant HODs in charge of courses (adjoints au chef de département en charge de l’enseignement) and the academic managers (responsables pédagogiques) of study programs or advanced topics, are held frequently and enable the coverage of both operational and more strategic aspects of the program.

  • Academic managers are generally teaching and research staff in charge of a coherent set of courses (unités d’enseignements - UE). There are generally two academic managers for an Engineering Degree Apprenticeship (FISA) (i.e. FIP, FIL or FIT), whereas each MS or MSc has one academic manager. There is also one academic manager for the advanced topics (thématiques d’approfondissement - TAF).
  • Course managers (responsables d’unités d’enseignement - RUE) are generally teaching and research staff in the departments; however, certain courses (Innovation, Professional Projects and Internships) are coordinated by staff belonging to the functional directorates.

The monitoring of teachers’ workloads is of interest to numerous stakeholders.

  • Teaching and research staff: for managing their teaching activities and informing their discussions with heads of departments during their annual appraisal interviews.
  • Heads of departments and their assistant HODs in charge of courses: for evaluating the workloads of the different teaching staff in the department, fairly distributing the overall workload among the teaching staff, anticipating future developments linked to the availability of teaching and research staff or changes in the study program, and providing justification for requests for new staff.
  • Directorate of Studies and Academic Life: for providing an overview of the impact of choices made concerning the study program, in terms of workloads and the costs of external contributors.

In the context of this project, the instructing party wants you to concentrate on the needs of heads of department (HOD) and their assistant HODs in charge of courses.

Expression of needs

Preliminary interviews with heads of department and their assistant HODs in charge of courses were carried out by a consultant from your consultancy. Here is a summary of the findings.

The requirements mentioned underline the need for indicators capable of providing an overview of changes in teachers’ workloads (individual or combined) over the years, and others that can be used to perform a detailed review of a specific period (typically one year) for a given teacher.

A consensus seems to have been reached on prioritizing the need to give heads of department an overview of the overall change in the workloads of the department’s teaching and research staff over the last three years in relation to the objectives set. “Workload” is defined as both the number of face-to-face teaching hours (which may also be converted into a number of equivalent seminar hours) and the number of course responsibilities. The proposed idea consists in enabling the measurement of the department’s involvement in the institution’s different teaching activities. In order to judge the department’s degree of activity, it would be useful to be able to compare the average or median workload of a teacher in the department in relation to a standard workload calculated for all teaching staff in the institution, but without aiming to make comparisons between departments. In addition, as the level of workload can vary according to the teacher’s activities, training or status, it would be beneficial to be able to analyze the workload according to these criteria.

In a second phase, two other needs were expressed: providing an overview of the workloads of teachers in the department over the current year, and showing the changes in a given teacher’s workload over recent years.

It is important to provide an overview of the distribution of the workload of teachers in the department over the current year in order to enable the heads of department and their assistant HODs in charge of courses to identify peak workload periods and thereby anticipate future problems in maintaining training activities. They need to be able to access all the information required to judge whether or not this workload is acceptable. This could relate to the number of face-to-face teaching hours (or the number of seminar-equivalent hours, and the number of course responsibilities fulfilled during each month of the academic year. Once again, the study program, the type of activity and the status of teaching staff appear to be important factors in measuring what is or is not acceptable and in identifying any problems. Another important need expressed in relation to this issue is the identification of courses taught during critical periods (significant workload at the department level) in order to be able to justify future staff recruitment requests. It would be interesting, for these courses, to measure the extent of the department’s involvement in them in order to determine an order of criticality.

The need to show changes in a teacher’s workload over recent years has been expressed very strongly by heads of department and their assistant HODs in charge of courses. Indeed, they find it impossible to identify the teaching staff who either do not achieve, or conversely, who exceed the objectives set in order to strike a balance in the workload within the department. In addition, the teachers’ degree of involvement in the study program can also be judged in light of the activities/programs in which they are involved, because a teacher may have a normal workload while being subject to an imbalance in terms of the activities he or she carries out. It should be noted that the aim is not necessarily to strike a balance per teacher, but rather to provide information that could enable the head of department to establish an overall balance at the department level. Heads of department have first and foremost requested an overview of all teaching staff in the department for the current year and the ability to click on an individual teacher in order to view a detailed breakdown of the changes in his or her workload over the last three years. Measuring these changes could help to assess the extent to which the teacher’s workload has changed according to his or her career plan (enabling the proposal of remedial measures, if required), or could be used to assess the potential impact of any prolonged absence on a given period (sabbatical, retirement, maternity leave or long-term illness).