2021 Overall Updates

[srkirkland]

Covering issue to track major changes for 2021. Will get broken down into individual issues once changes are better understood.

Hi Scott,

Everything is going smoothly with TACOS after the annual data refresh 😊

Penny has told us that the Dean’s Office would like to change the way the college allocates TA funding starting next fiscal year, 2021-2022. Some info is below but I’d like to talk through these goals with you sometime this year in the hopes that we could work on these changes in time for the next annual data refresh cycle around March 2021. I’ll be ready with some examples and scenarios for us to look at together.

I also went through my notes and added info on some of the other “to-do” list items we had discussed for TACOS.

No urgency. I’m happy to set a time/meeting far in the future (whenever works for you), I just wanted to put this on our radar as an upcoming need.

Thanks! Brian

TA allocation calculations for every-other-year courses Currently we allocate TA funding for courses taught every other year spread over two years. They get half the funding this year, half next year, and they build up the funds so they have enough in the year that the course is taught. Instead, the college would like to pull back all unused funds at the end of each fiscal year, which means that we need to change our process to ensure that the department gets the full allocation in the year they normally teach a course like this, and nothing in the “off-year”.

Annualization issue for approved exceptions of new courses We discussed an issue in Fall 2019 with the annualization formula that is causing approved exceptions for new courses (and courses that hadn’t been taught in 3+ yrs) to calculate zero FTE. If we change the way the system handles annualization to address #1, it should also fix many of the data issues we’ve seen with exceptions for unusually scheduled courses.

Cross listed course enrollment I’d like to revisit the calculations for cross listed courses, which Ken implemented last year before we were able to test the impact on the FTE formulas and which we had to roll-back because they were over-inflating the “number of times taught” per course and thus skewing the FTE. If we have to make changes to the way the formulas handle course frequency and annualization of FTE anyways for #1, it might be a good time to figure out how to factor in cross listed enrollment correctly.

Automate the Big Red Button – I remember you mentioning that we might want to automate the change in data source (academic term code) to update automatically so the entire annual data refresh can be handled with the one button.

Brian McEligot Chief Administrative Officer CA&ES Dean’s Office University of California Davis P: 530.752.3603

[srkirkland]

1. every other year -- include more information in courses to determine if a course has been taught last year or the year before. Use that to allocated 0 for the off year, 2*calculated for the on year.

2. Annualization -- Add another field to exception which asks for proposed number of offerings per year. Use that data to calculate exceptionAnnualizedTotal

[srkirkland]

3. Cross listed -- both sides of the cross listed course has it's own credit and non-credit section (don't sum them up). But do sum up the enrollment. Only one side is going to do the actual submission request