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Abstract

This paper examines UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences’ efforts from 2016 to 2025 to quantify teaching activities and establish fair faculty workload expectations. With significant leadership turnover since 2023, much historical knowledge and continuity risks being lost. By documenting the Faculty’s evolving approaches to measuring teaching load, this paper aims to support consistent, transparent, and equitable decision-making into the future. Teaching is often perceived as the easiest of the three traditional areas of faculty workload (teaching, research, and service) to quantify because of the widespread use of the credit which defines the hours students and instructors spend in the classroom in the teaching and learning enterprise (McMillan & Barber, 2020; Silva et al., 2015; Silva & White, 2015). This paper will uncover the complexities that are in fact inherent in metricizing teaching by showing the complex and context-dependent efforts the Office of the Associate Dean, Academic put into this task over the past ten years. With the advantages of hindsight and informed by my perspective as a key contributor in this process, it is possible to identify three phases with distinct characteristics that defined this work: (1) from 2016-17 to 2019-20 where contact hours were counted retrospectively and weighted according to the type of activity; (2) from 2020-21 to 2023-24 where credits were counted retrospectively and were no longer weighted; and, (3) from 2024 to present where credits are counted prospectively in a teaching assignment model. Across these phases, the Faculty’s efforts illustrate the importance of iterative development, consultation, and transparency to create workload expectations that faculty members view as legitimate and fair. Future efforts need to build on this collaborative approach. The open, iterative approach cultivated thus far can be refined and improved to make faculty members feel heard and accurately reflected in the model. A fair model can help engender faculty trust and improve job satisfaction and collegiality (O’Meara et al., 2019). This paper concludes with recommendations related to aspects of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences’ model that may help address persistent faculty concerns, such as addressing challenges in quantifying teaching through direct student supervision, choosing the optimal timing to distribute teaching assignments, recognizing teaching complexity and teaching modalities in the model, and offering opportunities for faculty to learn about the process and values attributed to teaching activities, in order to increase transparency.