Coordination of a team-taught pharmacy course: Reflection on a coordinator's task diary

There is little detailed information available in the literature about the day-to-day workload associated with pharmacy course coordination. A task diary kept by a clinical faculty member coordinating a required pharmacy course was therefore analyzed using the What? So What? and Now What? reflective model.

This course coordinator diary for a one-semester team-taught pharmacotherapy course at a public university spanned 425 days. The diary recorded 3063 tasks, of which the most common type of task was email, which constituted 61.5% of tasks. Other common task types were document creation and meetings. The most common task purpose was management of student absences. Other common task purposes included management of the electronic assessment platform, management of the electronic learning platform, and supervision of teaching assistants. Only forty tasks (1.3%) required doctoral-level training.

The large number of tasks may have ramifications for pharmacy faculty in terms of distraction from duties such as scholarship, service and patient care. The volume and administrative nature of tasks also have implications for faculty job satisfaction and burnout. For the institution and for students there are direct costs to fund doctoral-level coordinators as well as opportunity costs regarding faculty productivity and morale and availability of faculty to share doctoral-level knowledge with students.

There may be opportunities to assign administrative coordinators to reduce the direct and opportunity costs identified in the reflection. Non-doctoral staff with skills in administration and educational theory may be well-suited to optimizing efficiencies across multiple courses and offering student guidance.