Teaching Management System
The Teaching Management System (TMS) is a system for academic and administrative staff involved in undergraduate teaching in colleges and departments.
The Teaching Management System (TMS) is a system for academic and administrative staff involved in undergraduate teaching in colleges and departments.
Please see the TMS Access and Roles page for further information on access and roles.
TMS serves both colleges and departments, providing a common system for academic staff and undergraduate students, and greater visibility of teaching provided to undergraduate students across the University. Key features of TMS:
- Managing college and department teaching across multiple teaching types (for example, classes, revision, and practicals)
- Allowing tutors to record and submit teaching hours easily, whether for a group of students or for an individual student
- Providing students with easy access to tuition reports
- Calculating incoming and outgoing payments for tutors, colleges, and departments
- Publishing department teaching arrangements (classes) for student self sign-up
- Allowing tutors and students to view all their own teaching arrangements
- Tracking teaching hours against college (and department) stints
- Reporting
Governance
The remit of the TMS Management Committee is to ensure the successful operation of the Teaching Management System (TMS) on behalf of its users (colleges and departments) by working with the relevant bodies across the University. The committee also works closely with the TMS User Group. The Terms of reference are available here.
Update Trinity Term 2023
TMS Survey, Development and Known Issues
The TMS User Group and Management Committee have now viewed the initial results of the survey undertaken early in Hilary term. We received over 300 responses, which included some very detailed suggestions for improvements, and will be conducting in-depth analysis to ensure these are all noted and addressed when possible. We would like to acknowledge that some of the feedback has been very challenging, and it is very clear that improvements are needed.
Based on the feedback, the User Group identified some immediate priorities, including increasing the amount of time allowed before a user is “timed out” from 20 minutes to 3 hours, and making additional resources available to allow the system to perform adequately at busy times. These changes are being actioned and should be in place for the Trinity Term reporting period.
Please see the 'Known Issues' tab for details of current known issues within the system, progress with investigations and any available workarounds or advice. Please note that this part of the website is being updated frequently as advice changes and new issues are discovered and fixed.
Register of Approved Payments 2022/2023 Trinity Term
A revised version of the Register of Approved Payments for 2022/2023 that includes uplifts for national and University pay arrangements is now available.
You will be able to access searchable and accessible in-built Self Help guidance as you are using TMS. This means you won't have to stop what you are doing to access training separately but instead you can click a button in the same screen to get tips on the features you are using and continue with your task without having to switch systems.
For a list of ‘How do I?’ activities that Tutors might find useful for completing tasks in TMS, see the Quick Start Guide for Tutors.
For a list of ‘How do I?’ activities that Offices might find useful for completing tasks in TMS, see the Quick Start Guide for Offices.
Other Information Guides and videos are available as outlined below:
| TMS User Role | Document Name | Version | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Department Office | Information Guide (PDF) | 3.0 | 17 Feb 2023 |
| College Office | Information Guide (PDF) | 3.0 | 17 Feb 2023 |
| Organising Tutors | Information Guide (PDF) | 2.0 | 17 Feb 2023 |
| Tutors | Information Guide (PDF) | 2.0 | 17 Feb 2023 |
| Tutor Guide for Completing and Submitting Academic Reports in TMS (PDF) | 1.0 | 14 Nov 2022 |
TMS automated email notifications are sent in certain circumstances from the email address tmsapplication@admin.ox.ac.uk. For a full summary of notifications sent by TMS and who they are sent to please see the document below:
| Document | Version | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TMS Automated Notifications (Excel) | 1.0 | 21 Sep 2021 |
The following policy and procedural documents related to TMS may also be of assistance:
| Document | Version | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statement on HMRC Conditions for External Tutors (PDF) | 1.0 | 13 Sep 2021 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2022/2023 Trinity Term (PDF) | 2.0 | 11 Apr 2023 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2022/2023 (PDF) | 1.0 | 11 Oct 2022 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2021/2022 (PDF) | 1.0 | 13 Apr 2022 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2020/2021 (PDF) | 2.0 | 16 Nov 2020 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2019/2020 (PDF) | 1.0 | 10 Jan 2020 | |
| Register of Approved Payments for 2018/2019 (PDF) | 1.0 | 25 Sep 2018 |
Access and Data
TMS can be accessed via Edge, Chrome and Safari.
There isn't a logout button or option in TMS. You can just close your browser to end your session.
New office staff in colleges or departments need to be added by their Information Custodian (link requires SSO). New tutors need to be authorised by their college or department. Undergraduate students are automatically added to TMS.
SITS:Vision
Student data, including current course and year information, will be sourced from SITS:Vision.
Teaching Unit Management System
Programmes of study and related departments, subjects and teaching units will be sourced from the Teaching Unit Management System, more information about which can be found on the Teaching Unit Management System page.
Dynamics
Staff details will be retrieved from Dynamics, which holds contact information for most University and college staff, including external tutors.
An IC can have other roles but cannot assign these themselves.
If your IC needs additional roles, for example Office or Finance, please contact Student Systems who can set them up for you.
Postgraduate students can be authorised to teach and will be flagged as a student in their tutor authorisation.
The only undergraduate students that can be authorised as a tutor are those in year 4 or above or any student studying graduate entry Clinical Medicine.
For any other undergraduate student, the only workaround is to manage their arrangements and payments outside of TMS.
Yes they can. Virtual Access is a valid card type for external tutors (not on-site at Oxford) who need remote access to systems such as TMS. If the tutor you are trying to add already has a University card, then it isn't necessarily correct to change their card type.
Org unit profiles represent the different roles a tutor holds for an org unit (college or department) so you need one for each role.
Using TMS
Stint adjustments (Remission, Full remission or Addition) can be added up to 2 years in advance.
This could be when they are over-stint and ask for payment, or under-stint and assign external teaching to stint at a particular college.
Payment method is defaulted onto the payment claim to make report creation more efficient for the tutor, but the tutor can override that default on an individual report.
Local rates need to added annually as it is expected that these will rise with inflation.
They can be added in advance if you know what they should be.
Will tutors be able to create reports and ask for payment several terms after teaching has occurred?
Tutors will be able to create teaching arrangements for students up to a term after the student has left the college.
They can submit end of term reports up to a year after the student has completed their studies.
Tutors can complete reports up to a year after a student has completed their studies so might need to include recent leavers if creating a group retrospectively.
No, once an organising or pastoral student group is refreshed, access will be driven by the current list of students in the group.
No, it will not default to all on the tutor org profile.
So if you set a filter on years taught within the Tutor Directory or when adding tutors to a Teaching Arrangement, you will only return tutors who have specific values set on at least one of their profiles.
All users of TMS can select reports to view, print or save to pdf. The menu option name varies slightly for different users:
- Tutors and Students menu option is called My Academic Reports Print or Save to PDF
- Organising Tutors, Pastoral Tutors and Course Administrators menu option is called Academic Reports Print or Save to PDF, within the My Student Group Arrangements menu
- Office users, Reviewers and Senior Tutors menu option is called All Academic Reports Print or Save to PDF
No, a department does not need to authorise a tutor if the college has already done so but they will need to add an 'Org Profile' if they want to pay the department or credit the department stint for their teaching. Tutors only working for a college stint/payment do not need a department Org Profile.
Tutors can be authorised throughout term although APNTF uploads will happen termly
No, you do not have to assign students to teaching arrangements straightaway but can add as you or they know what they are doing.
To delete the teaching arrangement, go to Teaching > My Teaching Arrangements. Click the name of the teaching arrangement to be deleted In the top right corner is a pencil icon, click it. This will take you to the teaching arrangement creation screen. At the bottom of the page is a button called 'Delete Teaching Arrangement'.
You can only delete if no academic reports have been started. If they have, you need to first delete those draft reports.
If a department needs to be paid for undergraduate teaching undertaken by an APNTF, they need that tutor to be authorised in TMS and have the org profile for their dept so that payment can be processed.
For students in other departments you will need to search for them using their SSO identity.
The Right to Work should be checked by the college or department that will be paying the individual. TMS is not a Right to Work monitoring system however it does improve the visibility of some key information about a tutor at the time they were authorised. Guidance from Staff Immigration states that you only need to record Right to Work information in TMS for graduate students. Everyone else will be either a member of staff or self-employed. You are advised to continue with existing processes for completing Right to Work checks, sharing these checks in the out-tutors spreadsheet and monitoring anyone on list B.
Teaching Units are managed in TUMS and a daily update is run into TMS. Wherever possible do try to find the correct Teaching Unit for the option/paper being taught, if it doesn’t exist then search by subject name and select the generic teaching unit (‘Unit not Specified’), if you can’t find the correct subject search for ‘Subject not specified’.
It’s sometimes easier to find the right teaching unit within the All Teaching Units screen rather than the search box within a teaching arrangement.
Once you have found a suitable teaching unit using the search and filter options you can select Arrange Teaching to go straight to create a Teaching Arrangement.
You can't delete them but if you change the authorisation date to today it will expire tonight. That will leave just one authorised profile but both will still be visible.
There are maximum of 20 results displayed. If you don’t know the person’s SSO then to reduce the search results list keep typing more of their name. e.g. ‘Jackson T’.
Names cannot be changed in TMS because TMS receives the data from other systems. The record will need to be amended at source. For students, this will be in SITS, for staff it's in CUD. Once the name has been updated in the original system, TMS can be updated. To force a name or email change for a tutor, you can go to their Tutor Profile and their details will be re-checked and updated.
The organising tutors will only see the reports for the students in the student groups that they are assigned to.
TMS was created as a flexible system to suit the different setups in various colleges and departments. All authorised Tutors and Organising Tutors can create their own college Teaching Arrangements, but College Office also have permission to do this if they want. Tutors and Organising Tutors should confirm the correct process with their College.
Yes you can set them up as an Organising Tutor (just add a Tutor Profile of type Organising and assign them to their students via Student Groups). But you will only be able to give them the additional permission to approve reports if they are recognised as a member of college staff. That is driven by their University Card type and their student status takes priority.
Student email does appear on an individual academic report and in the Add student screen of a Teaching Arrangement. Bear in mind that you can enter SSOs into an Outlook email and that will find the related email address.
There is a list under Guidance and Support on the TMS page – All notifications are sent immediately (within 5 minutes) apart from two which are scheduled to run on a Monday morning.
Payments
The difference relates to who processes the reports and payment claims. For example, payment claims related to College teaching arrangements are reviewed and processed by the student’s college. Tutors, Organising Tutors and College Office staff can all create College teaching arrangements. Payment claims related to Department teaching arrangements are reviewed and processed by the department (Office staff) that created the teaching arrangement.
Yes. If that is how you normally pay invoices from departments.
For college managed teaching, where you are not responding to a department invoice, you can use the Payment files and Cashiers file from TMS.
The Preview payment file, used to check Processed payment claims before marking them as Complete, contains monetary values.
Any tutor who is also a student will be categorised as PAYE. Otherwise, it is based on their Teaching Org Unit profile, not the tutor category that they pick themselves. Connecting it with their Teaching Org Unit profile and having the college verify their status, the status will be more accurate going forwards. There are still a few edge cases where you may need to override the PAYE status. For example, if you have an out-tutor who works elsewhere but is doing part-time graduate study, TMS will mark them as PAYE because they are a student, so you may need to override this if that is not appropriate for the teaching they are doing for you.
Official guidance, 'commissioned via the Estates Bursars’ Committee, on behalf of all Colleges and PPH’s of the University' - now on the TMS website: Statement on HMRC Conditions for External Tutors.
If a tutor is on a retainer, then they need a Teaching Org Unit profile, so they will show up as PAYE.
You should contact the Information Custodian for your college/department and they can grant you access. If you aren’t able to arrange access this way, please contact Student Systems.
OxCORT
OxCORT has now been decommissioned and can longer be accessed. However, colleges should have taken copies of all historical reports before it is closed, so if you need anything that was on OxCORT, you should contact your college and ask them to find it for you manually from their archive.
Explanation of the terminology used in TMS (Teaching Management System)
An end-of-term academic report and associated payment claim completed by a tutor for an individual student.
‘Org Unit’ refers to your college or department (including faculty or sub-faculty).
Payment rates, arrangements, and weightings approved by the Senior Tutors’ Committee of the Conference of Colleges and maintained in TMS by the TMS Management Committee.
A stint is the number of hours a tutor is contracted to teach per week, term, or year.
Teaching Arrangement is an instance of teaching in a particular academic year or term, associated with a Teaching Unit, for specific tutors and students.
Teaching Units represent an element of a Programme of Study (such as a paper or module), and are pulled through to TMS from the Teaching Unit Management System (TUMS).
The Committee responsible to the University and the Colleges for the governance of TMS.
Last Updated: July 2023
Current and recently resolved known issues are listed below, and this section describes issues we are currently aware of, progress towards fixing the issue and any workarounds that are available.
A survey on TMS was sent out to all users in January 2023 and this has now closed. Feedback from the survey is currently being collated and the output will be used to help the TMS User Group and Management Committee plan for future fixes and enhancements to TMS.
Please continue to send any issues or feedback to student.systems@admin.ox.ac.uk. Any urgent bugs will be fixed as soon as possible by support teams. Any longer standing issues will be included on this page and shared with the TMS User Group in order to prioritise and plan support/development work.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002372
System Area: Tutor Directory, Authorise Tutor, Manage User Roles
Description: This issue occurs when a user is either trying to assign a user role to a member of staff or authorise a tutor and the system can't find the person in question. Common error messages include 'This user has not been located in the current Staff list' or 'This person does not have a current staff or student record that allows them to be authorised as a tutor'.
Workaround/Advice: Double check that the person in question can be added as a user (must be current University or College Staff) or authorised as a tutor (must be a current staff member, external tutor with a Virtual access card, a postgraduate student or undergraduate Clinical Medicine). If the user is still not appearing contact the Student Systems Support Centre.
Please note that this issue incorporates a number of different scenarios and while it is sometimes possible to fix individual cases it may not always be achievable. If we are unable to fix this issue please consider making an off-system arrangement to ensure staff are paid promptly. Any unresolved cases will be recorded against the problem.
Investigation Progress: This problem is currently being investigated as top priority although it should be noted that a number of different sources of this issue have been identified which are each quite complex to resolve. Technical teams met on 10/05/23 and are currently investigating the feasibility of some proposed options to help resolve the issue.
Last Updated: 23/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002497 (related 40002861, 40002632)
System Area: System wide
Description: Users have encountered numerous performance issues throughout TMS including individual tutors attempting to write/submit reports, batch processing of reports, searching for reports, creation of csv files for export, releasing reports. Performance issues tend to be reported mainly during peak periods of TMS usage, usually from around Week 7 to Week 9 of term.
Workaround/Advice: Please report any performance issues to the Student Systems Support Centre when they occur. For batch processing of reports or searches try to break down the amount of data being retrieved via filters, e.g. filter on term or report status.
Investigation Progress: Performance issues have been reported across the system and were frequently mentioned within the TMS survey responses. This is likely to be a lengthy investigation to cover server capacity and analysis of numerous functional areas of TMS. Some specific areas of the system that have already been identified as needing performance improvement (see related Known Issues for Outgoing Payments report and Bulk Release of Reports).
In preparation for Trinity term, between Weeks 5 and 10, the capacity of both the web server application and database tier has now been substantially increased. Support teams will be monitoring performance closely throughout this period.
Last Updated: 28/07/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002537/20015811
System Area: System wide
Description: The session timeout within TMS is currently too short and often users are timed out before they are able to complete a crucial task, e.g. while a tutor is writing a report. Session timeouts was also identified as a key issue in TMS Survey feedback,
Investigation Progress: A change was deployed to the system (ref 20015811) to increase the session timeout to 3 hours. Over Trinity Term 2023 there were no further support calls relating to timeouts.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002861 (related 40002497)
System Area: All Academic Reports
Description: The batch release of academic reports sometimes encounters problems. Typically, after selecting the appropriate reports via the filters and selecting 'Release' the system hangs and eventually displays a 'System Error'.
Workaround/Advice: Please report any issues with releasing reports to the Student Systems Support Centre. Breaking down the number of reports being retrieved by amending filters on the screen may help.
Investigation Progress: This issue is related to general system performance although this is a specific area that has been identified as needing improvement. A minor configuration fix has already been applied to the Academic Reports screen to assist in the performance but, in addition, a change request has been raised (ref 20015850) to look at re-designing the configuration of the screen.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002632 (related 40002497)
System Area: Payment Reports - Outgoing Payments Report
Description: A number of users have reported issues with the Outgoing Payments report particularly when trying to run the report for the entire academic year. The report fails to generate and returns an error message.
Workaround/Advice: Data can be retrieved by running the report with smaller parameters, e.g. by a term at a time.
Investigation Progress: This issue is related to general system performance. Technical team have identified some issues with the configuration of the report that are likely impacting performance and will be looking at a fix.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: 40002721
System Area: Academic Reports - Print or Save to PDF
Description: The filters on the 'Academic Reports Print or Save to PDF' are not working correctly when Year of Study is selected for a previous academic year, e.g. a search for Year 2 students in 2021/22 will actually show students who are in Year 2 in 2022/23.
Workaround/Advice: The content of the reports is not affected as this will state the correct year of study and it does not impact any searches for students in the current academic year.
Investigation Progress: This was related to a previous issue with Dynamic Student Groups (ref 40002701) which has been resolved. Additional work required is to fix the filters.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: N/A
System Area: Payments - Stint Reports
Description: A number of users have encountered errors with Stint Reports which include being unable to select all tutors in the report and errors in calculations, e.g. for local collections or tutors with stints at more than one college. There is no one specific issue with stint reports and many errors tend to be as a result of certain data issues. However some areas have been identified including Stint report 'Object' errors when tutors without a stint are included (problem ref 40002848), Stint reports not correctly calculating collection figures (40002792) and Stints being incorrectly flagged on the ‘Process Payments Preview’ report (40002847).
Workaround/Advice: If you encounter any issues with Stint Reports please do continue to report these to the Student Systems Support Centre. If you are attempting to run Stint Reports ensure you do not include tutors who don't have stints and/or try running reports for smaller groups of tutors.
Investigation Progress: A request for a change/enhancement (ref: 20015426) has been raised to review the design of the Stint Report screen. Other problems will be investigated by support.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: N/A
System Area: Tutor Directory, Authorise Tutor
Description: Users have spotted that some members of staff appear to be flagged as students.
Workaround/Advice: TMS records if a Tutor is a student at the time they were authorised to teach and that is visible on the Tutor Directory and the Authorisation History. For some ex-students the Student flag has been set against the Authorisation history when it shouldn't. If you spot this issue there is no need to report it to SSSC.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: N/A
System Area: Academic Reports - Contact buttons
Description: When using the CONTACT STAFF ABOUT THIS TEACHING GROUP or CONTACT STAFF/STUDENT ABOUT THIS REPORT buttons the generated email text has no line breaks.
Workaround/Advice: You can update or remove the original text as appropriate before sending from your email account.
Last Updated: 18/05/23
Problem/Change Reference: N/A
System Area: System wide
Description: On the TMS homepage and in other parts of the system, some users have noticed that their name does not appear correctly.
Workaround/Advice: TMS gets it's user data from Dynamics which is populated from the Core User Directory, PeopleXD (formerly CoreHR) and SITS. If your name or details are incorrect in TMS then please contact your local HR (college or department) to check and, if necessary, update the relevant system. If the issue persists please contact the Student Systems Support Centre (SSSC).
All student systems available!
Please see also the System Availability for details of the status of each system. For details of scheduled downtime please see the Notices page.
**Please note that the Student Systems Support Centre is currently experiencing a high volume of support calls and is currently operating with limited staff cover. As a consequence, we will also only be able to provide very limited telephone cover. We would advise contacting us by email rather than phone and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Apologies for any delays in responding to your call.**
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