The nature of academic appointments in Australia has changed. Given the recent emergence and growth of teaching focused academics roles across countries and contexts, in this conceptual paper we begin by parsing the language and role descriptions used for these academic appointments. Then, we consider what we know about teaching focused academics…

Hiring academic staff into departments and supporting them remains the single costliest activity that most institutions of higher learning engage in and requires careful, long-term, data-driven planning. This study identifies widely available (but seldom actually used) variables needed for this process: available instructional workload units and…

Department heads are central in the university setting as an important buffer between university leadership and academic staff. However, taking on a middle management role can lead to significant disruptions in academic careers. To investigate the career trajectories of 31 academics in middle management roles, two waves of semi-structured…

Australian higher education has faced both global economic and environmental challenges, including most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. To deliver in this resource constrained environment, academic workforce and academic roles are being reshaped. Teaching and education focused academic roles are rapidly increasing but come with opportunities and…

Utilising Bacchi's framework 'What's the problem represented to be?' the literature on managing academic workloads was analysed to explore why workload allocation models are deemed essential in the contemporary university and the assumptions which underpin workload allocations. Whether due to the need for efficient use of scarce resources or…

Occupational stress has increased in higher education academic staff over several decades, and this has been particularly acute in Australia and New Zealand. This scoping review sought to understand the causes and impacts of occupational stress among Australian and New Zealand academics. Eight EBSCO databases were searched for key terms: academic…

Many universities divide their academic workloads according to a model of 40 per cent teaching, 40 per cent research, and 20 per cent administration and service. Increasing demands on academic time, however, make this balance hard to achieve, since teaching and administration frequently impinge on research time. Moreover, regular academic…

In the higher education sector, military academies operate in environments that differ from university campuses. Like other institutions, military academies had to manage changes to learning and teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This required an approach, a model, that acknowledges and aligns with the needs of a military academy.…

An online survey of workload activities was circulated to academics across Australia seeking estimates for the time to undertake a range of academic-related tasks associated with teaching, research and service. This article summarises the most important findings from the teaching data of the 2059 respondents. This detail of workload data has not…

EU-Russia higher education cooperation has continued despite global tensions including Crimea incorporation. One example of this cooperation is the development of Finnish-Russian double degree programmes. This paper focuses on institutional environments where double degrees develop and asks how and why they produce uncertainty from inside Finnish…

Issues surrounding increasingly constrained resources and reducing levels of sector-based funding require consideration of a different Academic Work Allocation Model (AWAM) approach. Evidence from the literature indicates that an effective work allocation model is founded on the principles of equity and transparency in the distribution and…

An increasingly globalised world means that higher education institutions are employing a diverse set of academic staff from across the world, and a better understanding of these scholars and their work roles is important for effective teaching, learning, and institutional management. Using the most recent data available from the "National…

The workload of academics in Australia is increasing. Among the potential ramifications of this are work-related stress and burnout. Unions have negotiated workload models in employment agreements as a means of distributing workload in a fair and transparent manner. This qualitative pilot study aimed to explore how academics perceive their current…

This study is based on interviews with 25 programme leaders at two universities in England. Programme leadership is ubiquitous and essential to effective university operations, yet there is surprisingly little research on the role. It is an ambiguous and complex form of leadership, existing as it does in the space between standard academic and…

The demands on academic staff are increasing to the point where effective mechanisms for the allocation of their work are now necessary. Despite the inherent difficulties of categorising academic work, nearly all enterprise agreements at Australian universities include a clause designed to avoid work overload. Through a questionnaire, the…