April 10, 2003
TO: Deans, Directors, and Department Chairs
FROM: Peter D. Spear, Provost
SUBJECT: New "Credits Follow the Instructor" Report
Over the past year, we have had several conversations about the need for a "credits follow the instructor" (CFI) report -- a report that tracks student credit hours taught back to the department paying the instructor's salary. Knowing that credits can be tracked in this way helps overcome some of the concerns that deans, department chairs, and faculty have about teaching in interdisciplinary programs.
The CFI report is now available in addition to the traditional method of reporting credits. In the traditional method, "credits follow the department" (CFD), the timetable department in which the student registers receives the credits. One limitation of the CFI report is that it cannot be run early in the semester because it requires that the instructor for each of the approximately 10,000 sections offered each semester be accurately assigned and that each instructor be accurately linked (by social security or ID number) to payroll records. It takes time to establish and verify these linkages.
Reports for CFI credit tallies are posted on the Academic Planning and Analysis Web site. On this Web page, you will find the full report as well as some summary reports. You'll also find a description of the methodology used in creating these reports. For purposes of comparison, reports using the traditional CFD methodology for reporting credits by department are available from the Registrar's Web site.
You also can review the data in a more disaggregated form in the DoIT data warehouse. If, for example, you want to use a different methodology for handling sections with multiple instructors than was used in the official version of CFI (which divides credits evenly among all instructors of record), the more disaggregated data will allow you to do this.
In the future, we will be introducing a CFI tally of credits into standard reports that contain the traditional CFD tally. For example, we hope to do this in the Data Digest and Department Planning Profiles. Academic Planning and Analysis and the Registrar's Office also will provide electronic linkages between reports with the two different tallies.
The two people responsible for producing this report are Bruce Beck, Academic Planning and Analysis in the Office of the Provost, 263-4240 (bdbeck@wisc.edu), and Laura Hesse in DoIT, 263-4727 (laura.hesse@doit.wisc.edu), and they can answer any further questions you might have about the CFI report and its methodology. Developing this report was a complicated matter, with lots of pitfalls along the way, and I very much appreciate their efforts.
xc: Members of the Ad Hoc Committee on Interdisciplinary Programs
Bruce Beck, Policy/Planning Analyst, Academic Planning-Office of the Provost
Laura Hesse, IS System Development Services, DoIT
Annie Stunden, Director, DoIT
Martha Casey, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Office of the Provost
Sharon Pero, Assistant Registrar, Office of the Registrar