Issues in Teaching Allocation

observations by Jingling Xue

  1. The process can hardly be mechanisable:-) But it can be simplified if some data are easily accessible, such as the capabilities of teaching staff (which you have collected already) and their teaching performance in the past.

  2. Should all research groups share the teaching load of our key 1st and 2nd year courses?

  3. How do we deal with effectively the overlap between an undergraduate course and its postgraduate version (in terms of teaching allocation)?

  4. How can we teach all the core courses effectively while also allowing some people to offer advanced courses (which typically have smaller enrolment numbers)? How will the teaching load for such advanced courses be counted?

  5. What if someone consistently teaches courses badly?

  6. Should good teaching be rewarded (by the school) and how?

  7. How do we make sure that the core content of a course is taught properly, especially when the course is a pre-requisite of others?

  8. Good programming assignments are essential for most of our courses. Do we need to look at our courses and see if there is room for improvement?

  9. Multicore computing is likely to be the future paradigm. Concurrency will be the norm while sequential computing will be the exception. How should we revise our programs to prepare our students for the future, e.g. Intel's multi-core curriculum initiative

  10. SSP vs. teaching allocation