Optimize and simplify teaching assignments

PeopleAdmin is partnering with TAMS (Teaching Assignment Management System), built by Duke University, to bring efficiency, transparency, and trust to your course assignments.

A Complete View of Faculty Planning

TAMS and FIS offer the most comprehensive view of all aspects of faculty activity.

FIS and TAMS are revolutionizing the historically complex, highly manual teaching assignment process. Faculty can easily submit course assignment preferences, while administrators can determine the most qualified faculty and instructors with clear views of preference, capacity, and workload conflicts.

With the optimized utilization of their workforce, institutions can save hundreds of thousands of budget dollars each year by fully utilizing their salaried faculty and reducing the unnecessary use of part-time instructors.

Along with PeopleAdmin’s Faculty Information System, this collaboration offers easy and effective activity reporting, streamlined teaching assignments, and a feedback loop of course evaluation, institutions can optimize academic planning and fuel student success.

Transparent, consistent teaching assignment process
Operational cost analytics
Efficient, time-saving system
Low-touch and faculty friendly
Automated reminders for faculty
Single source of truth for course assignments

How can TAMs make a difference for your team?

Optimized Academic Planning

A robust, out-of-the box solution to meet all academic planning needs – something never before available. All built on a robust, state-of-the-art, highly secure SaaS platform hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Digitized Course Assignments

With centralized management across an entire institution, administrators can optimize assignments with just a click, saving hours of manual labor. TAMS displays each course that needs faculty coverage and then produces a list of suggested faculty for the course based upon:

who taught that course historically,
who asked to teach it in this academic period and
who has teaching workload availability

This single source of truth for course assignments eliminates dozens of disconnected spreadsheets. With real-time updates, you can be sure that every course is covered.

Build Trust and Transparency

With a transparent, consistent process, faculty have more clarity and trust in academic affairs leadership. TAMS helps ensure courses are taught by the most qualified faculty members while recognizing competing demands on faculty time, like leadership roles, research and other commitments that impact availability.

Real-time Information

TAMS makes teaching assignments and manages faculty workload in real time. Course assignments and faculty availability update automatically ensuring that each course is covered in the most efficient and effective manner. TAMS gives faculty more input into the teaching assignment process and allows administrators to reach out directly to individual faculty members for their teaching availability and preferences.

Predictive Analytics

Easily customizable analytics and reporting to drive decision-making and make reporting and compliance a breeze, and ensure more accurate and equitable decisions.

High ROI

From year one, TAMS can help institutions reduce instructor budgets by optimizing faculty assignments. Administrators can ensure that all faculty hours are being fully utilized and reduce the need to supplement your full-time faculty with part-time instructors.

Continuous Innovation

The TAMS community includes a broad variety of colleges and universities, and members of that user community contribute to the ongoing innovation and enhancement of the technology.

“We could not find another program that was customizable to this level. TAMS is able to accommodate every type of assignment and any type of workload calculation.”

“Our faculty have stated they enjoy the ability to view their teaching and administrative workload within the system which lends a better understanding of their role.”

“Savings associated with TAMS are substantial with respect to time and productivity related to the assignment process.”

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to implement TAMS?

We customize the TAMS implementation plan based on your needs and timelines. Generally, it takes 60 days to customize your instance of TAMS, and configure and upload your data. Training is fast and easy – usually just a couple of sessions and you are ready to begin working with TAMS.

Can TAMS be branded for my school?

Yes! TAMS can incorporate your school’s logo and colors into its interface, allowing it to appear branded like your other university systems. PeopleAdmin’s FIS and the rest of the HigherEd Cloud can also be institutionally branded.

Is TAMS customizable?

Yes! As part of our on-boarding process, we walk you through all the available options and customizable fields, so TAMS can mirror your current assignments process and workload or effort policies.

What support do I receive with TAMS?

As a licensee of TAMS, our team is ready to support you and the system after you go live to ensure you take advantage of all the features TAMS offers at no additional cost!

Are other products similar to TAMS on the market?

We have looked and didn’t find anything that we could use. That is why several years ago, TAMS was created by the Duke University School of Nursing for their use and is being made available to other colleges and universities today.

How does TAMS engage faculty in the teaching assignment process?

Using TAMS, administrators engage faculty directly to determine their course teaching preferences for one or multiple semesters. They can indicate whether or not their availability to teach a course will be impacted by research obligations, or other factors that would impact their availability. The TAMS administrator then uses this feedback as well as historical teaching information to make informed teaching assignments. A special feature of the TAMS platform is that it analyses faculty teaching preferences against the final course schedule. Administrators can then report the exact level of satisfaction of faculty’s teaching preferences to the final course schedule.

Can we schedule multiple semesters with TAMS?

Absolutely! TAMS supports your academic calendar, whether you use semesters, terms, quarters, annual periods, etc.

Make the best teaching assignments, every time.

Build a partnership between faculty and administrators that makes teaching assignments simple.