Description
Part-time lecturing is a familiar engagement that many lecturers in Kenya undertake. Lecturers are assigned lectures in multiple independent learning institutions and there is no platform to foster inter-university communication regarding the shared lecturers’ employment state, tenure and lecturing obligations. Commission for University Education has guidelines set to limit the maximum lecturer workload and yet there is no way in which Commission for University Education monitors and regulates inter institution lecturers’ teaching workload. There’s the need to employ technology to address this problem. Tutor management software available in the market today have no provision to monitor cross-campus lecturers’ workload but rather concentrate on the business aspect of automating scheduling, recruitment and billing for tutor companies. A critical survey of previous studies and current technologies associated to lecturers’ workload management was conducted. This helped establish and highlight the technological gaps to be filled by a web-based model for lecturer’s teaching workload monitoring in Kenyan institutions of higher learning. The methodology adopted by this research is a mixed research methodology, in particular the concurrent triangulation methodology. Proof of concept methodology was applied to develop and test the model. The research questions were answered through an experiment that entailed engaging industry experts in a validation exercise. The model’s properties that were validated included confidentiality, integrity, availability, user interface and viability. During focus groups, participants acknowledged the need to monitor lecturers’ workload to help in policy formulation and ultimately improve lecturers’ competency. Feedback received from a chief part of the participants also indicated that the model would be an efficient tool in addressing the workload problem. Further research should be undertaken to identify how the number of students taught by a lecturer and the type of course which a lecturer teaches may be used to corroborate lecture hours in quantifying a lecturer’s teaching workload.
