Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS)

First Advisor

Stephen Krebsbach

Second Advisor

Mark Moran

Third Advisor

Ronghua Shan

Abstract

Administrators at Daytona State College have long sought for a way to document how much it costs to offer a specific course. When an instructor is either an Adjunct or a fulltime instructor teaching an Overload - essentially, working overtime - this information is readily available. This is not the case for fulltime, salaried instructors who are teaching within the bounds of their salary, what is known as "Inload". There is no direct link in the database of Daytona State's ERP system that connects pay with courses and the fact that the institution's payroll accounting is handled by a third-party organization only compounds the problem. The courses taught by instructors are well documented, it is the payroll records, or lack of them, that is the core problem. We only have access to amounts paid with very few details about what the payment was for. Since salaried staff members at Daytona State, such as myself, are expected to work a 40 hour week, a similar thing is expected of salaried faculty members. However, since most courses require a considerable amount of time outside of the classroom either preparing lessons or grading them, the question arises of how to determine when an instructor has worked the equivalent of a 40 hour week. To resolve this problem "Load" was created. I don't how or when it came it to being or even what documentation may exist, it's just a known fact I've learned about from co-workers over the course of my 11 years at this institution. To get right to the point, Load determines how much time an instructor must spend in the classroom to equal a 40 hour week. For most college credit courses, but not all, the value is 15, meaning that an instructor must teach 15 credit hours per week to "earn" his or her salary. It is Load that makes it possible to resolve the problem of assigning dollar amounts to specific courses. Since we can determine how much Load an instructor carried for any course and we know how much his or her salary should be, I have simply divided the annual salary for a given calendar year by the total Load carried during that same period of time. The resulting figure, a load "rate", if you will, can then be applied to specific course to determine how much of the instructor's salary was dedicated to it.

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