Units - the spreadsheet hour. #

The basic unit of the spreadsheet is the hour . However, rather than being in absolute, real hours this is a representative, nominal hour. The credit received for undertaking a job on the spreadsheet is set according to a judgement of how long an activity should take, in real hours, for an average member of staff. ¹ These valuations were, in many cases, built on data based on real staff effort from the early years of the workload model. The workload credit for a job should not be seen as a rigid constraint on how long an activity should take, but as a guideline for the total effort required on average (for many activities per contact session) over a long period, either the entire academic year or, for lecture courses, over several years. The notion that this is a guideline does, of course, include an implicit recognition that different members of staff will take differing amounts of time to do the same job.