Updating Teaching Load Data

Every course instance needs to have information attached to it in EUCLID, for instance which School ‘owns’ the course. Less obviously, it needs other coding, to allow us to produce teaching load data (for internal use) and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) subject data (for external reporting).

We use teaching load data internally to:

• attribute tuition fee income to Schools/subject units. This is especially important when a course is taught by more than one School, as it financially recognises the input of the School(s) not owning the course but who contribute to the teaching of it.
• attribute main teaching grant to Schools according to the students they teach and the price rate at which Scottish Funding Council (SFC) funds them.

When multiplied by the number of students on the course, and the credit value of the course, these codes/lines generate student FTEs that are attributed to Schools/units. 

For example: two Schools each teach half of a 20 credit course to 60 undergraduates. Each School ‘gets’ 5 FTE (50% of 60 x 20/120). Simplistically, those FTEs then drive teaching grant attribution and fee income attribution to Schools. (2) and (3) above –  the who and the how much - are needed for this attribution to work. 

The detailed HESA code (1) and percentage (3)  are also used to flag what subjects are being taught at course level in universities; programmes also have HESA codes but those are inevitably more general and less representative of the broad range of subjects being taught at course level in universities.

The principle for HESA ‘cost centre’ data is ‘follows the money’ so getting the ‘who’ right (the SU units involved in teaching) is the most important part. 

To illustrate with an unlikely example, if School of Mathematics staff were to contribute to teaching a modern languages course, the FTEs generated would be attributed to the Mathematics HESA Cost Centre. (1) who was teaching, is the primary driver for HESA Cost Centre FTEs with the (2)  the HECOS code describing what was taught, of secondary importance.  

Often, only one line is needed for example where the School of Chemistry teaches all 100% of a chemistry course. Some  others need to represent cross University teaching and so need more than one line to demonstrate the subject units undertaking the teaching.

For each course, regardless of how many SU codes are involved, the number of HECOS codes that can be allocated are constrained by the following HESA rules:

• At least 1 and no more than 3
• The HECOS code(/s) must represent the subject taught in the course and should represent directly or relate very closely to the course title 
• Each HECOS code must  be a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 100% 
• Who is teaching can change but HECOS codes are not expected to change between instances.  Any major changes of more than 5% difference for a HECOS code would normally require a new course to be created.  

For each course, the number of subject (teaching SU) units that can be involved in teaching do not have the same constraints.  There can be as many internal SU units as needed and % representing their teaching allocation but when concatenated into eg “100471_SU300”, the HECOS elements must follow the rules above. 

Schools should normally add Teaching Load information directly into EUCLID at the point a new course instance is created.  The course subjects are not expected to change between course instances, but there may be good reason to update, between course instances, where the subject unit undertaking the teaching changes.

Course subject information is held at course instance level.  As such, it is necessary to set this up year on year, except in instances where a course instance is rolled forward, and the information was contained in the previous instance.

For courses which have run in a previous year, you can find your previous course subject information in CCAM and copy this to the current instance.

There is a list of current available Teaching Load codes at the link below which can be used to help you select the most appropriate codes for your course. If the code you require is not on this list please email studentsystems@ed.ac.uk with the details of what you are hoping to add.

For any further help on Teaching load data coding, please contact your College leads.

CAHSS Lead: College BI Team - cahss.bi@ed.ac.uk

CSE Lead: Steve Scott  - sd.scott@ed.ac.uk

MVM Lead: Isabel Lavers - Isabel.Lavers@ed.ac.uk 

Step by step guidance for updating your codes in EUCILD's CCAM screens can be found below.