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Online Faculty Development Course
How Much Work for Students?
How Much Work for Students?
Alongside everything discussed in the previous pages, you are probably have a more basic question: how much should I expect students to do in my online or hybrid course?
When switching from F2F teaching, this is a natural question. But you probably ask this when crafting F2F courses, or did in the past. In fact, many professors' sense of student responsibilities is from experience as a student, and advice from colleagues. But there are guidelines that were developed over a century ago, and have been honed by government and accreditors since. Let's take a look at what these institutions say:
New York State
New York State
The New York State Education Department declares that
Regardless of the delivery method or the particular learning activities employed, the amount of learning time in any college course should meet the requirements of Commissioner's Regulation Section 50.1 (o), a total of 45 hours for one semester credit (in conventional classroom education this breaks down into 15 hours of instruction plus 30 hours of student work/study out of class.)
For a three-credit F2F undergraduate or graduate course, that means roughly 45 hours of classroom instruction, and 90 hours outside of class. Or, for an online course, 135 hours' work, total, or perhaps nine hours a week.
On their website, NYSED elaborates on this guideline a bit:
NYSED admits that determining students' level of effort, or time spent, can be "difficult for anyone other than the course developer or instructor to determine accurately." So rely on your best judgment, and listen to what your students have to say, either in course evaluations, or even by soliciting their honest feedback within the course.
But NYSED's short discussion of student effort is generally helpful, and they offer a helpful tip: where you can, be explicit to students about the amount of time they might reasonably expect to spend on different activities in the course. The isn't always easy to do, since different students have varied strengths and weaknesses. But anytime you can provide a rough estimate, at least, it can be helpful.
Federal Requirements
Federal Requirements
At Canisius, we offer courses measured by credit hours that are described by the above NYSED guidelines, and also Federal Department of Education (for Title IV funding) rules. These are endorsed by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), our accreditor. Here's what the U.S. Department of Education has to say about the credit hour:
…An amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that is an institutionally established equivalency that reasonably approximates not less than:
(1) one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or,
(2) at least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution, including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.
Obviously, an online asynchronous course almost entirely falls under "other academic work leading to the award of credit hours!" As we said previously, U.S. Department of Education requires the elements of Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) within online courses. But after that, Uncle Sam effectively leads the overall workload up to instructors.
Students as Insiders
Students as Insiders
More broadly, be as transparent as possible about the purpose of students' work. Why are they doing what they are doing in your course? With assignment instructions, at the start of synchronous activities, or even in a comprehensive paragraph at the beginning of your weekly module, state briefly what course content, activities, or assignments are meant to accomplish, as far as learning objectives. This heads off student suspicions that assignments and activities are basically busy-work. Even if a student doesn't agree that something is helpful for their learning, they can see that the course follows a plan. (So they might better be able to constructively discuss their view of it in course evaluations.)
"Helping your students understand what they are to do and why it's valuable is especially important in online classes," Flower Darby points out, "because you don't have the opportunity to detect confusion and answer assignment-related questions in real time the way you would in the physical classroom."
We will revisit this in greater depth, in Lesson 4.
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