RRCFA President's thoughts on FWA

Fellow Instructors:

I have been a member of the RRCFA since it was founded in 2016. I know the founding president, Teresa Menzies and still keep in touch with her. I have verified what I am about to write in the following two paragraphs with her.

It was members of the executive council of the RRCFA that submitted a bargaining proposal two contract negotiations ago asking for the College to publish a report containing a list of all Instructors sorted by department name with the number of contact hours each one had been scheduled to teach for each academic year. The proposal did NOT ask for instructors names to be show on the list. Each instructor was to be given a random number in their department so that nobody would know exactly which instructor had exactly which contact hours.

The reason for this request was to put pressure on chairs to make sure that the workload of each instructor in their department was as fair as possible AND to put pressure on upper management to make sure that Instructor workloads across the College were as fair as possible. A Letter of Intent was included in the contract (See pages 142 to 144 if you still have your copy) which resulted in a Taskforce being set up to decide what kind of extra information would be included in the report. The Taskforce consisted of RRCFA executive council members and members of College management.

After a number of years, the Taskforce made its recommendations, was disbanded and a new group, the Faculty Workload Assignment Implementation Advisory Group (FWAIAG) was set up with mostly the same people on it. This group still meets monthly and provides recommendations to the Executive Director Academic (Jeanine Weber). I am one of the three Instructors in this group, along with Tara Mullen (past president of the RRCFA) and Matthew Fontaine (MGEU Local 73's Chief Steward).

The college has been collecting data on each Instructors' contact hours for 3 and a half years. Despite Instructors in the group asking for the data to be released for the first year, it was never released, supposedly because the data gathered was so bad, not that we know what that exactly means. Only some of the data from year two has been made available for instructors to see and (unfortunately) only in aggregate form. That is to say, only data for three schools has been provided and only averages for each of those schools. While the data for year three was collected by Spring of last year, no data from that year has been published yet. This is not what instructors wanted.

I am well aware that some (all?) Instructors are not happy with the FWA tool. I don't care for it much myself. I would like to share what I think is wrong with it and provide some ideas on what could be done to make it easier to use and accomplish the goal those who made the original bargaining proposal originally had in mind. I am hoping to figure out away to survey Instructors with the goal of coming up with a bargaining proposal that the majority of Instructors think is worthwhile.

What's wrong with it

1. It doesn't allow instructors to report that they've spent more than 0.8 hours on preparation or assessment or students consultation.

2. It assumes that instructors never spend anymore than 1356.25 hours actually working for the College and only allows them to report on how they spent that amount of time.

3. It forces instructors to estimate how much time they've spent on various activities and also how much they're going to spend on some activities because the data we have to enter is partly about the future. In my opinion, nobody likes estimating AND nobody's very good at it.

4. We could ask instructors to actually keep track of how much time they spend on each activity but most Instructors probably don't want to do that and many will simply exaggerate how much time they actually spent on various activities.

5. Some chairs have reportedly been changing instructors data without their consent.

What could be reported instead.

Instead of asking instructors to estimate numbers, perhaps the tool could simply collect data that the College already has.

1. How many different courses an instructor has taught in a year.

2. How many students they have taught in an academic year.

3. How many times they have taught each course before the current term.

4 How many other instructors are currently teaching the same course as them.

5. How many times the course they are teaching has been taught in the past.