Karl Ewald, CCFT Treasurer and Negotiations Team
While there is no specific contractual definition of the total time an adjunct unit member spends for 1 teaching unit, the historical breakdown of a teaching unit generally assumes that for 1 teaching unit, an instructor spends 1 hour in class, 1 hour prepping/grading, and roughly 0.4 hours in office hours.
Where TUs are broken down into an hourly rate, such as for Academic Specialists or Instructional Support Faculty (Appendix AA.7), there is a clear connection between a teaching assignment and the expected hourly commitment. Each TU equates to 2.4 hours (144 minutes) of work. By using this AA.7 as a guide post, we can break a teaching unit down consistently and examine the effect of load factors in changing the balance of time spent in class, prepping/grading, and in office hours.
Section 11.1.3.1 defines an office hour as 50 minutes. Section 11.1.3.3.1 indicates regular/contract faculty member must hold 5 hours (5 x 50 = 250 minutes) of office hours per week. A regular/contract faculty member is expected to teach 15 TUs per semester. By putting these pieces together, each TU equates to 17 minutes of office hours (250/15 = 17 minutes). This also serves as the prorated office hour obligation for adjunct faculty. A typical 3-unit course requires 160 contact minutes per week. This equates to 53 contact minutes per TU (160/3 = 53 minutes). The remaining 74 minutes are for preparation and grading. In summary:
Contact Hours: 53 minutes
Office Hours: 17 minutes
Preparation/Grading: 74 minutes
This is shown graphically in Figure 1.
One tool we have to change the relative balance of contact hours, office hours, and time for preparation/grading is by applying a load factor. The load factor translates the number of class hours to TUs. As an example, let’s breakdown my ENGR 45 lab. This lab has 3 hours of student contact and a load factor of 0.8 which translates to 2.4 TUs. We can convert this to 346 minutes using appendix AA.7. We can then divide this total time into our three components and calculate per TU commitments:
Contact Hours: 77 minutes
Office Hours: 17 minutes
Preparation/Grading: 50 minutes
Section 11.2 covers the various semester load factors and the classes they are applied to. To see the effect of these load factors, see figure 2.
