Comparing and assessing department-level instructional workloads: a study in data management

Hiring academic staff into departments and supporting them remains the single costliest activity that most institutions of higher learning engage in and requires careful, long-term, data-driven planning. This study identifies widely available (but seldom actually used) variables needed for this process: available instructional workload units and student credits. While doing so, this study also walks through best practices in extracting such variables from administrative systems in repeatable, auditable ways using stock database design tools and methods. Finally, this study (literally) illustrates, in practice, how surfacing such variables in readily interpretable tables, pictures, and interactive dashboards can facilitate their application and use, by providing administrators with ways of presenting these data to peers and oversight boards in transparent, ideologically neutral, but yet actionable, formats. Although this study brings considerable quantitative data to bear, it is, at its core, a practical study in how academic administrators should be managing their data-the 'new gold'.