Creating Space Through Evidence

Amid rising student expectations and increasing demands on academics’ time, universities are grappling with how to create the space academics need to focus on their core mission of education and research. With competing responsibilities stretching the academic work week, university leaders are seeking clearer visibility of teaching effort and stronger evidence to guide decisions about workload, course design, and the shape of the taught portfolio.

Meaningful workload reform depends not just on local insights but on the ability to compare patterns of teaching effort across disciplines, schools, and peer institutions. One university that has taken significant steps forward in this space is Griffith University. Led by Provost Professor Liz Burd, Griffith launched its Making Space in the Work Week initiative, a whole of institution effort to diagnose the drivers of academic workload and create the conditions for more effective teaching and research, and used Nous Data Insights’ Teaching Effort Analytics to validate insights, strengthen internal confidence, and accelerate its reform efforts.

Meaningful workload reform begins with understanding the real source of effort

Griffith’s Making Space initiative was launched in response to ongoing concerns amongst its academics about escalating workloads and administrative burden. These pressures were amplified by the shift to remote learning during COVID‑19, but continued as student expectations and technologies evolved, bringing requirements for new teaching modes, content and pedagogy.

With limited capacity to grow resourcing, Griffith set out to examine what was truly driving workload. For this, they needed reliable and robust data. The Making Space team surveyed academics to understand workload drivers such as time spent marking assessments and analysed how course structures and student numbers interacted with workload. This data provided the foundation for a more nuanced and actionable approach to workload reform.

From this work, four key drivers of workload emerged:

  • The number of small courses
  • The volume of classroom-based activities
  • The number of assessment items
  • Total contact hours per course

By focusing on these drivers, Griffith created a more nuanced and actionable understanding of where workload pressure was accumulating and where interventions could deliver the most impact to ease their academics’ concerns.

Griffith enabled academics with data to address the drivers of effort

To translate the diagnostics into action, Griffith undertook a structured change process grounded in clear, university‑approved benchmarks. Each school received a detailed data pack summarising key workload drivers (equivalent full-time student load (EFTSL), class sizes, number of assessments, and student contact hours) alongside benchmark thresholds set by the University executive team. Course instances falling below these thresholds were flagged in a supplementary spreadsheet, prompting schools to either change them or provide a justified exception. Changes rarely meant discontinuing courses. Instead, most actions involved redesigning delivery to better align with benchmarks while maintaining high quality education, for example by adjusting class configurations, consolidating assessment tasks, or reconfiguring contact hours. This process gave schools a transparent, evidence‑based framework for reshaping academic workload. 

The initial analysis provided clarity and measurable improvements. Overall, 42% of all unique course instances were flagged as exceeding the thresholds set for least one of the workload drivers, and some exceeded multiple drivers. Of those courses, 49% were changed or placed under review within the following 12 months, translating into a projected 42,000 hours of workload saved. 

As more institutions look to free up academic time and enable staff to focus on their core mission of education and research, Griffith’s experience offers practical lessons for universities navigating similar pressures.