Workload Distribution in Departments
Every year in March, the college predicts the number of students in each course and sends this to departmental coordinators. Departments can decide to change the courses given, but the amount of allocation is fixed unless the department can demonstrate a good reason for more allocation. The department then has to distribute the workload equitably (8-6:03) among the teachers in the department (i.e.who teaches which courses) over the academic year. Tenured teachers have to be covered first and then non-tenured teachers by priority. It should be noted that having a right to workload does not mean that any particular teachers have the right to individual courses. Departments should decide on a method of dividing up the workload and coordinators are given the responsibility of actually doing this and submitting it to the department. (Article 4-1:10).
Many departments have found an equitable way to distribute workload by first having each teacher submit their ranked choices to the department, meaning that each department member is aware of everyone’s choices and no teacher is guaranteed choices over anyone else. Then the actual workload distribution proposal is done, on an equitable basis, by the Coordinator/s and presented to the department. If your department has not formalized rules under which to operate, we urge you to do so, as soon as possible. The Fneeq document “A Look at Departments” can be a very useful document to help departments to make such rules. It can be found below
http://fneeq.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/Formation-departements-anglais-2011-04-.pdf
http://fneeq.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/Formation-departements-FR-2011-04.pdf
If you have any questions about workload distribution, please come and see a VCTA executive member in C101.