Learning lines mapped to ease workload
With funding from the Work Experience Fund, the Work Balance in Action core group aims to ease teachers' workload.
The 2022 Staff Monitor showed that workload is a major issue. The University Council has therefore made two million euros available in an appropriately named workload relief fund. The budget is intended specially for ‘local’ initiatives, located as low down in the organisation as possible.
At HUM, this budget will fund a project to map the learning paths of BA courses. Many academics struggle with the combination of demanding research and time-consuming teaching. By clarifying which skills students acquire and when, it should be possible to make teaching more efficient, which will have a positive effect on the work balance of lecturers and students.
Good for teacher and student
Jaap Kamphuis, a member of the Work Balance in Action core group, has been involved in the project from the beginning. ‘Every course has to embed 13 cross-curricular skills within the teaching programme,’ he says. To do that, you need to have a good understanding of how you teach skills within your programme. Not only that, study programmes need to free up the fifth semester for teaching minors courses, which will also mean adjusting the learning paths. We are therefore first going to organise a pilot to map out the learning paths for six study programmes. This semester, we’ll make an inventory based on syllabi and talks with lecturers.' After the first phase with six programmes, the other bachelor's programmes will be screened in a similar way based on the results.
This is expected not only to show the extent to which the programmes are already succeeding in implementing these skills, but will also identify duplications or gaps. Kamphuis: ‘Sometimes students have to write a big essay for three different courses in a semester. Then it might be more efficient to find another form of assessment that is less time-consuming for both the teacher and the student.'
It is important to the faculty that you are happy in your work. We are therefore intending to sound out your opinion this spring via the work experience survey. The results will be used to make improvements that will enhance your job satisfaction. The invitation to the survey was sent by mail.