This PHP web application supports the allocation of teaching duties to academic staff. It is very important that teaching loads are distributed in a way that is fair, and is seen to be fair by all staff. TODB enables everyone to see what they and their colleagues are supposed to be doing and it facilitates load balancing. Its advantages over the spreadsheets used by most departments are that it is web based and designed for this specific purpose.

This application is a generic version of an original program known as the Teaching Office Database (TODB), developed at the University of Cambridge by Richard Prager and Patrick Gosling of the Engineering Department and genericised by Matthew Jones and Anne Clarke at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology (CARET), funded by a grant from the JISC.

The module centres around three tables: teaching staff, courses, and teaching duties associated with the delivery of each course unit. Each teaching duty is assigned to both a staff member and a course unit, and may be weighted with a “point score” representing the nominal amount of work involved, which may be fixed or a function of the number of students taking the course. The system calculates the teaching load for each member of staff and will report the total staff hours allocated for the delivery of each part of a programme.

Data are stored by academic year, and teaching points sums are presented for each year for which there are data, facilitating year-on-year comparison. Jobs are also associated with other information, such as the subject group to which the job belongs, the activity type (lecturing, administration, practicals, etc) and the term in the academic year when it is performed, to enable further reporting.

The TODB does not make resource allocation decisions itself, but it greatly facilitates the teaching allocation decision-making process by making appropriate information available in an appropriately-structured manner; it effectively provides instantaneous answers to questions about teaching allocations and teaching load, and can do so in 'real time' during the teaching allocation process.

To get started, check out the code and follow the instructions in Teaching Office Database Installation & Configuration to install the code and DB. A demo system is available here: http://todb-demo.caret.cam.ac.uk/ . If you need help getting started, drop us a line at todb-support at caret.cam.ac.uk .