TOWARD ACHIEVING QUALITY IN FACULTY-LOAD ALLOCATION: A DEVELOPED FACULTY-LOAD-MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

In most academic institutes, there is an increasing demand on faculty members to perform not only more teaching and research but also community service and administrative works. Simultaneously, they also face growing pressure to improve the quality of their work. Therefore, maintaining a balance among these different tasks is a major issue in academic institutions, as it is imperative for academic administrators to ensure that the faculty members work productively and are also satisfied. Information systems that will help manage workload allocation and accurately measure academic input and output must be maintained. These systems will directly affect academic performance management. Accordingly, we propose and develop a faculty-load--management system (FLMS) for our university. The proposed system manages workload allocation and time-conflict detection in addition to information management and reporting. The proposed FLMS system is based on the client/server model. Two databases were developed, one for faculty and the other for courses, sections, and administrative tasks. On the client side, there will be a browser, which is responsible for user interaction, and it connects to a web portal (server), which performs data processing. FLMS was developed and tested for our academic department. It was evaluated by the faculty members and administrators, and the results showed that the system met their requirements and helped in maintaining both quality and faculty satisfaction. However, based on user feedback, some improvement to the FLMS is planned as future work.