WF-08 — Faculty Allocation, Workload, Credentialing and Development

This workflow scores nothing and can lose a great deal. KPI 4.1 is a ratio, and IoL cannot influence the numerator from here. What it can do is put the wrong people in the denominator. Including a clinical skills trainer or a teaching-only appointee who should have been excluded silently depresses a KPI that a small, research-intensive institute ought to score well on, and the depression is invisible: the number simply comes back lower than it should, with no error to investigate.

1. Purpose

To ensure that every person who teaches, supervises, examines or researches for IoL is appointed against a correctly classified employee category, carries a recorded and defensible teaching and research workload, holds a captured ORCID identifier where they are research-active, is registered with any current professional or industry affiliation that qualifies their teaching as partner-delivered, and is supported by a documented development programme, so that faculty data is a by-product of appointment rather than an annual reconstruction.

2. Scope

Scope statement. This process manages academic and research staffing for IoL from the identification of a teaching, supervision or research need, through appointment or engagement, workload allocation and credentialing, to the recording of faculty development activity and the annual verification of the OBEF faculty data set.

Applies to. Full-time and part-time IoL academic staff; research staff; clinician educators and adjunct or affiliate faculty who teach on PGDipHPE or MScHPE; simulation faculty and debriefers who carry a timetabled teaching load; external industry faculty recorded in Course Faculty.xlsx; and the development activity of all of these.

Does not apply to. Central MBRU HR establishment control, recruitment authority, contracting and payroll, which sit outside IoL and which this workflow feeds rather than owns. It also does not apply to publication capture itself, which is WF-18, or to research project registration, which is WF-15.

Applicable requirements. OBEF guide v11.5, KPI 4.1 including its denominator exclusions, KPI 4.2, KPI 3.3 qualification criteria, KPI 2.1 rubric criteria 2 and 3; the Future Readiness Potential assessment, Pillar 2 indicator 4.1 on faculty AI competency support and training; CAA faculty qualification and sufficiency standards; MBRU appointment and credentialing policy; CHEDS Employee - Basic Details.xlsx, Employee - Workload.xlsx and Course Faculty.xlsx.

The definition that governs everything below. KPI 4.1's denominator is full-time academic and research staff, and it excludes two named groups: staff below doctoral level who teach exclusively in foundation-year and general education programmes, and staff with no research duties, such as technical trainers and lab assistants. It includes, when they carry a teaching or research load, academics, research staff, the president or director, vice-presidents and deputy directors, deans and deputy deans. The word "exclusively" is doing real work in the first exclusion, and "no research duties" in the second. Both tests are about the person's actual duties, which is why they must be recorded in Load_Employee_Category and Load_Research_Workload rather than inferred from a job title later.

3. Trigger, boundary and endpoint

4. SIPOC

5. Accountability

Process owner. IoL Senior Director, or the role able to negotiate establishment with MBRU HR, agree clinician educator release with Dubai Health entities, and decide workload policy.

Escalation.

6. Process steps

1. Define the academic need for the period. Derive teaching, supervision and assessment demand from the study plan and the course inventory. Record the demand in contact hours, which is the unit KPI 3.3 uses and the unit that makes the eventual co-delivery claim testable.

2. Appoint or engage. Whether the appointment is a substantive IoL post, a joint appointment with a Dubai Health entity, or an adjunct engagement, an employee record is created before any teaching is allocated. [CAPTURE] Emp_Employee_ID, Emp_Name, Emp_Position_Title, Emp_Employment_Status, Emp_Hire_Date, Emp_Department, Emp_College. Serves 4.1.

3. Verify and record qualifications and credentials. [CAPTURE] Emp_Qualification, Emp_Years_of_experience, and the credential evidence itself. Serves 4.1 through the doctoral-level test in the exclusion rule, and serves CAA faculty sufficiency requirements independently.

4. Capture ORCID at appointment. [CAPTURE] Emp_ORC_ID. Serves 4.1 and 4.2. This is the highest-leverage single control in Pillar 4, and it costs one field on an appointment form. The Ministry pulls the KPI 4.1 numerator from Scopus and the KPI 4.2 value from SciVal. Attribution of a paper to MBRU depends on author disambiguation and affiliation strings. Without ORCID, MBRU's numerator is understated in a way MBRU cannot see, because a missing publication generates no error, no exception and no query. Capturing ORCID after the fact is possible but rarely happens, and it never happens for someone who has already left.

5. Classify employee category and full or part-time status. [CAPTURE] Load_Employee_Category, Load_Full_Part_Time, Load_Position_Title. Serves the 4.1 denominator. Decision point, and the one that matters most in this workflow. Apply the exclusion rule by recorded duties, not by job title:

   • Exclude staff below doctoral level who teach exclusively in foundation-year and general education programmes. A staff member who teaches one general education course and three programme courses is not excluded.
   • Exclude staff with no research duties, such as technical trainers and lab assistants. For IoL this is the live case: simulation technicians, clinical skills trainers and learning-technology staff who support teaching but carry no research load.
   • Include academics, research staff, the director, deputy directors, deans and deputy deans, whenever they carry a teaching or research load. Leadership roles are frequently and wrongly dropped from the denominator, which inflates the ratio, and an inflated ratio is as much a misstatement as a depressed one. Record the rule applied, not just the outcome, so a second analyst can re-derive the denominator.

6. Allocate teaching, research and other workload in hours. [CAPTURE] Load_Teaching_Workload, Load_Research_Workload, Load_Other_Workload, Load_Maximum_Workload, Load_Total_Credited_Courses, Load_Program_codes. Serves 4.1, and serves the programme-level attribution rule. Note the programme-level attribution rule for KPI 4.1: a faculty member working across several programmes may have a publication counted for all of them, which makes Load_Program_codes a scoring field rather than an administrative one. Populate it for every member of staff who teaches on both PGDipHPE and MScHPE.

7. Record industry and professional affiliation. For any faculty member holding a current documented professional affiliation with an industrial or economic sector in the same field, record the organisation, the nature of the affiliation, the evidence and its expiry. [CAPTURE] affiliation record in the IoL Industry-Affiliated Faculty Register. Serves 3.3. The OBEF guide states that courses taught by such faculty count toward KPI 3.3, provided the course meets the minimum requirements. For an institute inside an academic health system, a substantial share of teaching is delivered by staff who hold a current clinical appointment with a Dubai Health entity or a current office in a professional association. That is exactly the described case, and it is currently invisible because nobody records the affiliation as an attribute of the teacher.

8. Record external industry faculty on the course. Where the teacher is not an MBRU employee, [CAPTURE] Faculty type, Name of the industry, Email of the industrial faculty, Percentage of teaching workload, Percentage of course design workload in Course Faculty.xlsx. Serves 3.3. Exception route. A session delivered by an external clinician with no Course Faculty.xlsx row cannot be claimed later. If the row cannot be created because the individual will not supply an email, record that fact, and do not claim the session.

9. Deliver and record faculty development. Maintain a development record per faculty member covering assessment design and moderation, supervision, simulation and debriefing, and AI in teaching and learning. [CAPTURE] activity, date, attendance, and the competence outcome where one is assessed. Serves 2.1 indirectly, through the quality of blueprinting and marking, and serves the Future Readiness assessment. Be clear about what Future Readiness is and is not. The OBEF guide states plainly that the Future Readiness Potential assessment result is independent and will not affect the OBEF scores of the institutions concerned. Its Pillar 2 indicator 4.1 asks whether the institution provides guidance, training and structures supporting AI adoption in learning and teaching, and this workflow is where the evidence for that would come from. Do the development work because it is right for the learners and the faculty; record it because the badge asks for it. Do not present it internally as an OBEF score contribution, because it is not one.

10. Record assessor, examiner and debriefer competence. Who is qualified to set, moderate and mark which assessments, and who is qualified to debrief simulation. Serves 2.1 criterion 3 and WF-12.

11. Verify the annual faculty data set. Re-derive the KPI 4.1 denominator by rule from Load_Employee_Category and Load_Research_Workload, reconcile against Employee - Basic Details.xlsx, audit ORCID completeness and audit Scopus affiliation strings for MBRU variants. Serves 4.1 and 4.2.

7. OBEF data generated

Capture rule. Three things must be recorded at the time and cannot be reconstructed afterwards: the ORCID identifier, because it is captured from the individual and not from any system MBRU owns; the professional affiliation with its evidence and expiry date, because affiliations lapse and the evidence disappears with the person; and the workload split between teaching and research in hours, because a retrospective workload is an assertion rather than a record. The employee category can be re-derived if the underlying duty data exists, which is precisely why the duty data is what must be captured.

Reproducibility test. A second analyst can reproduce the KPI 4.1 denominator from Employee - Basic Details.xlsx joined to Employee - Workload.xlsx, applying the documented exclusion logic to Load_Employee_Category, Load_Research_Workload and Emp_Qualification, only if the exclusion logic is written down as a rule. Today it is not written down anywhere in the IoL document set, which means the denominator is currently a matter of judgement exercised by whoever prepares the extract. That is the capture defect this workflow closes, and it is a defect of documentation rather than of data.

8. Max-score design

What this workflow must do to reach the target.

1. Write the KPI 4.1 exclusion logic down as a rule and apply it by query. No hand-curated denominator. Owner: Data Steward, signed off by Quality and IQA.
2. Capture ORCID at appointment, as a mandatory field, for every academic and research appointment. Owner: HR Partner and Data Steward jointly.
3. Record workload in hours with a teaching and research split, for every member of staff, every period. Owner: Senior Director.
4. Populate Load_Program_codes for every faculty member who works across both programmes, so publications attribute to both. Owner: Data Steward.
5. Register every current professional affiliation with its evidence and expiry, and re-verify annually. Owner: Programme Director.
6. Create a Course Faculty.xlsx row for every external teacher before the session runs, never after. Owner: Programme Director.

[REDESIGN] actions.

Sequencing note. R1 and R4 are free and immediate. R2 is the one to do before the next extract, because every year the denominator is produced by judgement is a year that cannot be reproduced later. R3 is the sleeper: it converts an existing fact about IoL's faculty into a KPI 3.3 qualification route without changing a single timetable.

9. Indirect strategy where data cannot be collected

Category 1 applies to KPI 4.2, and Category 4 applies to everything else this workflow touches.

Category 1, the Ministry holds the instrument, for KPI 4.2. MBRU submits nothing for the Field-Weighted Citation Impact. The Ministry takes it from SciVal. There is exactly one lever, and it is ORCID and Scopus affiliation hygiene, which is why R1 and R7 appear in this workflow rather than only in WF-18. This is the clearest case in the pilot of a KPI where the correct response is not to try to influence the number but to make sure the input is clean and then stop. Monitor MBRU's own SciVal figure independently, so that a discrepancy with the Ministry's figure can be raised as a question of fact rather than a complaint about a score.

Category 4, activity exists but is invisible, for KPIs 4.1 and 3.3. IoL faculty publish, and IoL faculty hold current clinical and professional appointments across Dubai Health entities and professional associations. The publishing is invisible when ORCID is missing and the affiliation string is wrong. The professional affiliation is invisible because nothing in any current process asks for it. Neither is a strategy problem. Both are register problems, and both are solved by R1 and R3.

A note on why this workflow claims no primary KPI. It would be easy to assert that WF-08 "owns" part of KPI 4.1 because it produces the denominator. It does not. The number is produced in WF-18 from Scopus and the register, and the responsibility for it belongs there. Claiming a primary KPI here would split accountability for a single figure across two workflows, which is the condition under which numbers go unowned. WF-08 is accountable for the denominator being right and for the ORCID being present, and that is stated in section 5 rather than dressed up as a KPI.

Boundary check. This workflow must never:

• exclude a staff member from the KPI 4.1 denominator on the basis of a job title, when their recorded duties place them inside the included groups;
• exclude leadership roles (director, deputy directors, deans, deputy deans) who carry a teaching or research load, since the guide includes them expressly and excluding them inflates the ratio;
• exclude a staff member who teaches partly, rather than exclusively, in foundation-year or general education provision;
• record a professional affiliation that has lapsed, or one that is not in the same field as the course, in order to qualify a course for KPI 3.3;
• claim a session as industry-delivered where no Course Faculty.xlsx row with a working email exists;
• record planned workload as delivered workload;
• present Future Readiness activity as contributing to the OBEF score, since the guide states expressly that the Future Readiness result is independent and does not affect OBEF scores.

10. Service standards

11. Records and evidence

Appendix B readiness. Today, IoL could most likely produce employee records, qualifications and workload allocations within 15 working days, since these live in MBRU HR and registry systems. It could not produce a complete ORCID register, and it could not produce evidence of current professional affiliations for the faculty who teach on its programmes, because neither register exists. Those two gaps are R1 and R3, and they are the reason this workflow appears in the pack at all.

12. Risks and controls

13. Performance measures

The first four measures are the whole point of this workflow. It produces no KPI of its own, so its performance is measured by whether the KPIs other workflows produce can be trusted.

14. Change control