Is over 25hrs teaching per week unheard of for uni academics?

[Dontfxckupthetable]

Asking for a friend, is over 25 hours of contact teaching time per week unheard of? I did a little google and it seems that uni lecturers commonly work less hours than this for actual class teaching. But my friend is doing over 25 hours per week. They’re coping well, I’m just a little concerned for them.

25 hours is a lot, although it depends whether they’re on a teaching-only contract or a teaching and research contract. The former will get more teaching than the latter.

But your idea that academics work less than 25 hours a week is almost laughable. I don’t know where that has come from, but everyone I know works at least 45 hours a week and others much, much more.

It's a lot, even for a teaching-only contract. That being said, a colleague of mine once worked these sort of hours, though it was under the agreement that he would not be given a major admin role. This meant that, outside of term time and once assessments were over, he did very very little. In other words, very tough terms but good and long periods of rest in-between. It worked for him.

@historyrocks yeah I meant over 25 hours of teaching contact time, as in, if every class was an hour long, over 25 classes a week. I don’t actually know the duration of their classes though, they’re probably (hopefully) longer in duration than that. Of course then there is all of the prep and marking that goes with it, which is on top.

@dodi1978 so it can conceivably be normal under some contractual obligations. Seems reasonable. I’m not an academic so I wouldn’t know, I just wanted to find out if they were being taken advantage of.

It also depends on how many modules they’re teaching on as to how demanding it is. It’s much easier to teach the same hour-long classes 8 times over than to teach an hour for 8 separate modules. Also depends on whether they’ve taught the module before.

Ouch! If that's for three terms and they're expected to do research they need to join a union pdq. On the other had if it's just that this term happens to be when all their teaching takes place and the next two terms are a lot less then ok for a teaching only contract.

Very very very broad rule of thumb for teaching only is that each context hour is two to three hours of work, including prep and marking. For lecturer contracts again a rule of thumb is a third of annual hours are for teaching, which will include the prep and marking (so a 1500 hour a year contract would have 500 hours of teaching of which max 170 hours a year would be contact hours).

That is insane! I teach between 6-8 hours a week and I think that’s at the top end of what’s acceptable. Colleagues on teaching contracts would do more like 10-11.

professors in germany have that kind of teaching load. but I haven't heard of it in the UK

Is it a Post 92? Post 92 National Contract says max 18 hours a week and that only where no other significant duties.

However, some degrees have short terms/ teaching blocks - so 25 hours a week for 3 weeks for e.g. might happen and be balanced out elsewhere.

I work with lecturers who teach up to 40 hours per week but only for 2 or 3 individual weeks per year (the busiest one I know does 5 module weeks). The rest of their time is spent supervising student research projects, doing their own research, marking work, applying for funding, getting companies to send new students (most of our students are sponsored), dealing with continuous student queries and those are just the tasks I know of. They are horrendously busy 99% of the time, whether they're teaching or not. It's pretty standard to get emails from them during evenings and weekends. It's also pretty standard for them to turn up to meetings on their days off (even more so now we have Teams).

Full time teaching only contracts in my dept will do 15 hours plus admin, prep , tutorials and other duties. I cannot imagine 25 hours in HE. Colleagues in FE however would do that I think.

Is your friend a temp member of staff? I was temporary cover for a lecturer for a couple of years and I had one term where I did 10-15 hours of lectures per week and then taught back-to-back classes from 2-6 through the afternoon three days a week. Depending on the week that took me over 25 hours, but it was only for one term and then I had a far lighter teaching load (more like 6-8 hours a week). I was meant to be research active. Since my students were writing essays every week it was fairly brutal.

What is more worrying is that I know people who have had shorter contracts, who still had to do those very full-on terms. That's less good, because you never get a chance to catch your breath.

I did 23 hours a week at an institution I previously worked in. Barely had any marking to do though.
I now teach 13 hours a week but with a heavy marking workload on all modules.
Honestly in my case 23 hours was less work. ( Not that I am suggesting it will necessarily be the case for your colleague. It very much on the uni, contract, job descriptionetc).
My line manager told me she would only give me 10 hours next year. I told her I would rather have 13 well timetabled than 10 poorly timetabled ones. So many different factors (and tastes) at stake!