Designing a Model

Designing a Model

WAM provides several functions to help you implement your model. Of course you can implement your model by working out all your hours and percentages of staff time outside the system on paper or however and entering it in. But WAM can allow you to help make some adjustments.

Work Packages

As noted elsewhere, setting up a Work Package lets you make some assumptions about days worked, but there are also another three fields of interest:

• Credit Contact Scaling
• Contact Admin Scaling
• Contact Assessment Scaling

The first number, defines a multiplier from the number of credit points a module has to the number of contact hours it has. Remember, this is only used to calculate contact hours for a module if you haven't directly specified a number.

Similarly, if no number is given for Admin Hours in a Module, the Contact Admin Scaling will be used to infer this from the Contact Hours. If set to "1" for instance, then the Admin Hours and Contact Hours will be equal.

The same is true for Assessment Hours and the Contact Assessment Scaling.

But what about Modules with large class sizes? Well, in the Module Sizes setup you can also define Admin and Assessment Scaling Factors.

Example

A Module has no explicitly defined hours. It is 20 credit points, and has 200 students. The Module Size within which 200 sits specifies an Admin Scaling and Assessment Scaling factor of 1.3.

Assume the Work Package has a Credit Contact Scaling of 1.5, and a Contact Admin and Contact Assessment scaling of 1.0.

Then:

• the Contact Hours will be calculated at 20 * 1.5 = 30
• the Admin Hours will be calculated as 30 (the contact hours) * 1 (the admin scaling) * 1.3 (the size scale factor) = 39
• The Assessment Hours will be calculated as the same for Admin hours.

The point is you have a lot of control over the default assumptions of WAM.

Remember that any hours you place directly in a module override all these assumptions.