There's another round of UCU industrial action taking place throughout February and March this year. 18 days of strike action in total over these two months. I'm not going on the picket lines today (virtually or in person) as I actually have today 'off' as TOIL because I took on 'extra' work on a day that I don't normally work. That was authorised ('official' so-to-speak as it was a full day's work that wasn't on my workload), but it has made me think of all the other days that I've been forced to work on that I didn't get 'back', i.e., Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It has also led me to question my now 11 years of experience working in Higher Education as a teaching dominant staff member; particularly my working patterns.
My verdict is that to be an academic with at least 50% of your time dedicated to teaching (and all the associated duties with that) means that, inevitably, you have to volunteer a substantive portion of your non-work time to get everything done. This is not breaking news - it has been widely discussed in the media for quite some time now. This is especially the case if you have a multifaceted role (which a lot of teaching dominant academic staff do) where you both lead and contribute to different things. Technically, I'm a 0.8 FTE academic. This means I should only work 4 days a week, 7.5 hours a day. Sometimes, this can be indeed possible. But, the norm by far is that I work over my hours - often logging on around 8am in the morning, taking a very short lunch break (99.9% of the time I eat at my desk and work while I have lunch), and logging off around 7/7.30pm, depending on if I am cooking dinner and/or if I'm travelling from the office. The majority of my teaching is online as well, which means I pre-record a lot of my lectures and I have to design tasks (which involves setting up discussion boards etc) for my students. Because the university lecture capture software seems to be both regionist and classist (I have a thick central belt of Scotland accent), I often have to 'fix' some of the subtitles/captions on my lectures (this isn't on my workload to do this - but I do have students from across the globe and some with learning adjustments that need the captions/subtitles). I don't have time to fix them all (this would take hours - my lectures are often 90-120 mins long with breaks in between), but I will spend around 20-30 mins checking the subtitles, normally at key points where I think it is most needed. All in all, recording lectures, waiting for them to upload (you can't really do much else but respond to emails while this is happening - my RAM can't cope), requesting machine generated captions/subtitles (this can take a while as well), fixing them, and then uploading everything on to the learning platform for the students (with PPT slides, discussion boards and tasks) can take a whole afternoon. And this is just for one lecture - often I deliver 2-3 lectures per week. That's 2-3 afternoons a week for just doing this (I only have 4 afternoons a week I should be working).
This isn't even counting in lecture prepping time. I normally set students four pieces of reading for each lecture at postgraduate level, and two pieces of reading for undergraduate. Good teaching practice (quite rightly) dictates that lectures should be primarily using the reading we set the students in the lectures. So, we have to read this material (and take notes) before we start constructing the PPT. This takes 2-3 hours (sometimes 3-4 if its postgraduate level and the material is quite 'tricky' or long). Then, there's constructing the PPTs which I think takes the longest. You have to structure all that material (and often have to cut a lot of material out to make the lecture a decent length, so you go through versions of lectures - often getting smaller rather than bigger with each version). Then, go through it all and make sure it is 'accessible'. This can take at least another half-day. So, for new lectures that last 90-120mins, you are looking at 12-15 hours of academic time needed to do this. We get 8 hours on our workload. On average, I'm volunteering 5.5 hours of my time for each new lecture I deliver.
And then there's delivering 'existing' lectures that either you or a colleague delivered in the past. Regardless if it was you or someone else who delivered that lecture in the past (and there's PPTs for it available), you get an hour to prep for each hour of existing lectures you deliver. So, if the lecture is 1 hour, I get 2 hours and 10 mins to prep it, record it, upload it, 'fix' it and design all the tasks associated with it. Even if it is my own previous lecture, I still update it, which involves having to re-record it and all the tasks associated with that. It's very rare that I re-use lectures (I did reuse two lectures last year as I had 3 lectures to record and/or deliver face-to-face a few weeks and I ran out of time). But, you need way more than 2 hours to refresh yourself with the set reading, look for any new material to incorporate into the lecture, actually update the lecture, and to go through the lecture notes you made to remind yourself of your key arguments. You end up volunteering another 1-2 hours for each lecture. And then there's the lectures that a colleagues delivered and you've picked up. You still only get 1 hour to prep this, but this can take hours to prep because you have to read all the set reading (some of it you are reading for the first time) and you often don't have the lecture notes that accompany the PPT. If it's a pre-recorded lecture, you can watch your colleague deliver the lecture and take these notes, which often takes at least 2 hours. If it's not a pre-recorded lecture, you need to do the notes yourself from the reading on the slides and, often, this is much more work that just designing this lecture yourself as you have to chase up each citation on the PPT, find the key points, and then make notes for the lecture. It's honestly like delivering a new lecture from scratch. It takes at least 5 hours to do all this prep work, and then you have the recording or delivery of the lecture. So, you are volunteering another 4 hours of your time for each of these lectures.
60% of my contract is teaching or teaching-related activities. This includes all of what I've just discussed, plus marking (I'll come to that), course organiser duties (designing learning platforms, course handbooks, exam board preparation, responding to student queries on the course), dissertation supervision and personal tutoring (I'll come to these as well). So, technically, that's 16.8 hours a week, roughly, I have to do all this. You can see that even if I have one new lecture that week, I'm already reaching this quota. But, that doesn't even count course organiser duties (on my workload it works out about 25 hours for each course - so that's designing the learning platform, doing assessment tutorials, exam board preparation, responding to student queries, having tutorials with students with learning adjustments, organising the marking and moderation, and arranging the moderation for the external examiner all in 25 hours. On average, I end up volunteering at least 10-15 hours more for each course I organise, and a lot of this usually involves working with students with learning adjustments, late approvals or special circumstances that isn't priorly factored in. Last semester I was course organiser for two courses, and this semester I'm course organiser for one course. That's 75 hours of my workload for course organisation, with an additional 40-55 hours volunteering each year to do this role.
The marking is another nightmare; arguably as much of a burden as lecture prepping and what I give most of my voluntary hours to each year. For a 1500 assignment, I get 15 mins to mark this, give feedback and upload the feedback. There is no additional time if a student gets in touch for clarification of their mark and/or comments. For a 3000 word assignment, 30 mins to mark. 4000 words, 45 mins. If there is academic misconduct, there is no extra time to deal with this. This academic year I have marked 1500, 3000 and 4000 word assignments. It takes me at last 1.5-2 times the allocated time to mark each assignment, especially if the student gets a mark lower than 60% as you spend a lot of time explaining (and referring to the script) how the student could improve the grade for the next assignment. I've had 3000 word assignments where I've written 1000 words of feedback to the student because it was particularly problematic and I wanted to help them as much as possible improve for the next assignment. This ended up taking me three times the amount of time I was allocated in my workload to mark this. Each year, I can volunteer at least 40 hours a year marking course assessments at undergraduate and postgraduate level. This is not counting Master's dissertations which are another beast.
The dissertation supervision and personal tutoring are difficult to quantify because it really depends on demand. I am a personal tutor for 20 plus part-time Master's students and I get 1 hour for each student, which means 20 mins a semester. This includes email traffic to and from the student. It also involves meeting with students to discuss personal issues, special circumstances applications, interruptions of study, return to study and planning course choices. Some students, it's very light touch and may be as little as 10-20 mins a year through emails. Other students, it can be very intensive and with some students I have spent at least double this time. With Master's dissertation supervision, we get 15 hours a year for each student and in my experience so far, it is in reality more like 20-25 hours per year, especially when you are going through their final draft at the end and making some 'light' suggestions. It can take longer than 3 hours to read the full draft itself and make notes.
The reality is that teaching dominant academic staff are volunteering a lot more hours to do what is actually on their workload. And the rest of the workload is the same. It takes more hours in reality to do the programme director, research lead and scholarship work. And then there's the meetings and training that goes into the 'citizenship' black hole and half of them don't even end up on your workload in the first place. All in all, I work way over my 28 hours a week and I have been doing this role for over 11 years. I've gotten 'better', i.e., faster, at things, but I can never match the tariffs. The only real defence we have is to push-back on meetings (both with staff and students) but this inevitably ends up in complaints. And when you explain that you literally do not have any time in your diary for the next three weeks to fit anything in because you've micro-managed everything to get the basics done, you are told to 'manage your time better' as it is in your workload (and often it isn't) so you should have time to do it.
But, the real pushback is academics refusing to volunteer and only give the amount of time they are allocated for tasks. This will involve lectures being half-finished, assessments not fully marked, leaving meetings actually on time (I was recently in a meeting than ran over by over an hour), and stopping supervision and personal tutoring as soon as the allocated time runs out. So, it is the student who will suffer. And that's why academics volunteer their time, because they want to give students a good education and they are making up for a system that doesn't appear to value that - it just wants as much work out of academics for as little as possible. I think this needs to be stressed in the current UCU dispute - if academics didn't volunteer things would only get half done and we would have to stop providing provision as soon as a student came to the end of their tariff.
It's the workload that is the killer for me. The pay, pensions, precarity and inequality is for another post. But the workload really is not fit for purpose and inevitably results in academics volunteering their time to 'humanise' a system where students are numbers and expected to conform to a 'ideal student' model. It puts staff in increasingly punishing situations where we are front-line and students want / need more than what is allocated but we can't give anymore because we're already going way over and above to deliver the basics. I'm tired. I'm fed-up and I don't think I can sustain this any longer without major overhauls. I don't think they are coming any time soon, unfortunately. But, we are fighting. And putting ourselves into debt in the process while, still, volunteering our hours to either do what we can for students in the minute spaces we have left and stand in picket lines protesting.
These are not good times.
