I will provide an overview of Teaching Office Database software developed within University of Cambridge Will include: Examples of Departmental Institutional Change Practice of Teaching Allocation and its effect on Curriculum and Teaching Intro Demo Discussion Links to Generic system
TODB links teaching staff (people) to teaching jobs. Teaching staff are assigned to particular teaching jobs. Jobs may have different weightings – time, popularity etc History : Engineering Department saw a need Address questions: What jobs are being done by a particular member of staff ? Who is in charge of this task ? SW: On-line Configurable php/MySQL Open source
Demo System: Front page Access to different views Help Admin user can create new year
Jobs Filtering mechanism Use to allocate people to jobs Special filter - Show unallocated jobs
Demo: People Filter by Department/Subject Group Columns configurable Show jobs for person Show timetable Show breakdown
Timetable Overall
Points Summary report Customised to fit institution Shows totals for each person by Job type
Where departments had existing systems tended to be unwieldy spreadsheets with access limited to administrator Now: Teaching Staff and Committee can access and query info on-line.
Would have been very controversial to introduce points at start Once people were familiar with system they were happier to see points - can be gradual process as admin only could see at first Discussion Points for number of students taking module, number answering question May decide to abandon points completely COs Something interesting to do Stepping stone to more IT based admin within Dept
Customisations Shows participating departments and project status
Variation and overlap of specific features
More detailed breakdown of who wanted which functionality What has been incorporated into Generic
Engineering – detected that disproportionate amount of teaching time assigned to Year 2 Some roll over jobs and people from year to year, Others want to start with ‘clean slate’ - same jobs diff people. Some have courses that change significantly from year to year and need to reassign and rebalance Engineering and JBS share courses and staff TODBs can communicate with each other and give jobs from both depts for a given person Have Jobs and people which could be fed into a fuller timetabling system with venue and timeslots
