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Educator's Voice

Volume 6, Issue 3
March 9, 2005

Student Workload in the Online Course: Balancing on a Rule-of-Thumb

In conversations with individual instructors and workshop groups, the question of how to equate student workload to credit hours is often posed. Specifically, many instructors want to know how to ensure that student workloads in online and hybrid courses align with the accepted standard for student workload per credit hour for traditional courses.

Instructors usually reach one of two conclusions. One group feels that a resolution is immaterial, since these kinds of time estimates don't compute for most on-ground (OG) courses anyway. (See Wellman and Ehrlich for a discussion of this viewpoint.) Perhaps this is true. Accreditation bodies, however, will likely find this to be faulty logic, as noted in the first paragraph of the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions' March 2001 statement, Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree and Certificate Programs. Remember, time-on-task for most activities is traceable in the online environment.

The other group of instructors is concerned with designing online activities and assignments to equate to the accepted rule-of-thumb for student workload. These instructors want their online offerings to contain the same amount of student work as OG equivalents. They also guard against requiring more work in their courses than is appropriate, based on the number of credits awarded at course completion.

What is the rule-of-thumb for workload? I've somehow known this since my grad teaching days, but a Google search of the words "study hours per credit hour" will produce site after site recommending students study 2 to 3 hours per credit hour each week. This study time includes preparation for and follow-up to in-class meetings. Following this formula, the hourly workload for a three credit course lasting 15 weeks would be 45 in-class hours and 90 to 135 hours of out-of-class study for a total of 135 to 180 hours of total student involvement.

Broken down into weekly hours of effort for traditional and accelerated terms, the totals look like this:

Term Length	Time In Class	Expected Out of Class Study Time*	Total Time Per Week
15 weeks	3	6—9	9—12
8 weeks	5.5—6	11—18	16.5—24
6 weeks	7.5	15--22.5	22.5—30

How does this rule-of-thumb translate to fully online and hybrid course models? Because the online course houses or is the jumping-off point for almost all activities, how do you determine what "out-of-class" study time is?

A first determining step is to define out-of-class study activities for a typical OG course. Some things that come to mind are assigned reading, homework, project or presentation-oriented groupwork, exam prep and paper prep. All of these are activities we also require in online and hybrid courses.

Now let's look at activities that are traditionally carried out in the OG classroom. According to the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) carried out by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) at Indiana University, “…faculty report spending about 40% of their class time lecturing, 16% on small group work, and almost 15% of their time on experiential activities such as labs and field work....The remainder of their time is spent on a variety of activities (e.g., instructor led discussions, student presentations)" (p. 7). Again, these activities are also present in the online class environment.

The same categories of activities exist in both classroom spaces, but online instructors modify OG classroom activities to conform to best teaching practices for the online environment. Here are some examples of modified activities:

• An online lecture may be an instructor's commentary on readings, with some links to illustrative images, media or text.
• Small group work may be a quick breakout in the discussion area for a few days.
• Experiential activities can be online labs, interviews, activities within the community and online field trips.
• The threaded discussion will allow the instructor to expand on the lecture and also facilitates post-lecture Q & A and general student interaction. The discussion is the heart and soul of the online course, and will require more than the small share of time allotted it by OG faculty in the survey quoted above.

As you can see, online teaching methodology both combines and reformats discrete OG classroom activities. The online lecture is both lecture and reading. Time spent in group work is mostly measurable (as opposed to OG) and consists of research, reading and writing. Experiential activities include reading and writing as the student reports back to the instructor or group. A threaded discussion is reading, writing and (ideally) part of the instructor's lecture component.

Here is my point: The process of developing online courses includes identifying OG components and changing their nature by and through application of best practices in online teaching. This "renaturing" of activities and assignments makes trying to align the online activity with the OG activity useless for calculating student workload. Instead, try using the raw number of contact + out-of-class hours for weekly student workload, then subtract your estimated online activity and assignment completion times from that.

Here are examples using a 9-hour per week model (using a 15-week traditional semester, a 3-credit course, and a 2-hour per credit hour out-of-class study requirement):

1. Hybrid
   In a hybrid course, there is a set amount of class time which can be immediately subtracted from the total time. Let's say that you have one OG class meeting for 1.5 hours of "seat time" per week, a 50% reduction from a normal OG course's class meeting time. You prefer to use this class time for traditional lecture. In the 7.5 hours of remaining student engagement time, you:
   • Assign 1 hour of textbook reading.
   • Assume that the student spends an additional ½ hour studying your notes on the reading and exploring the links to illustrative material you provide in these notes.
   • Assign 2 discussion topics with a triple-layered response requirement ** which require a total of 3 hours to read and to compose and post responses (1/2 hour per layer in each topic).
   • Require the students to complete a ½ hour self-assessment to review their understanding of concepts from the lecture and reading.
   • Stipulate that groups meet online to work on an iterative deliverable for an ongoing class project. For example, discussing and producing an outline for a final document requires 1 hour of each group member's time.
   • Assign written homework from the text for an additional 1 hour of work.

   The remaining half-hour is "wiggle-room." Based on your familiarity with your institution's typical student and of the content and activities you have assigned, you can either require an additional activity (journaling, for instance), or you can decide that one or more of the assignments above will likely take a bit more time for the average student. You could designate the ½ hour to those assignments.

2. Fully online
   The fully online course will follow the same pattern as the hybrid example, but the lecture component kept in the OG classroom will be folded into the course and will account for the 1.5 hours of student involvement:
   • Several short, chunked lectures that cover one key topic each, and which link the student to illustrative resources should be added.
   • After each lecture, a short "knowledge check" self-assessment will help the student gauge his/her understanding and retention of the lecture material.

   If you haven't been teaching (online or OG) for very long, estimating task completion times won't be an exact science. Some things that may help:

   • Remember that students don't typically read as quickly or absorb information as readily as you do. Time assessments should be based on the student's level of study and not on the instructor's abilities.
   • After reaching your estimated completion times, poll the first group of students as they move through your course on the amount of time they spend studying and doing assignments and activities. If you make it clear that you are not including the results of the poll in the student's grade, you are likely to get reliable feedback.

   Balancing time limitations with learning objectives is difficult in any situation, but it helps to approach the task with a plan!

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* As a side note, the Deep Learning section of the National Survey of Student Engagement 2004 Report relates: "In general, faculty expect students to study about twice as much (6 hours per class week) as students actually reported (3 hours per class week)."

** Based on a week's timeframe (Mon.--Sun.), the triple-layer discussion format is structured as follows:

1. Student responds to your discussion topic by Tuesday p.m.
2. Student replies to at least two other student's postings by Thursday p.m.
3. Student responds to all replies to his/her initial response (#1) by Sunday p.m.

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       -- Vicki Galloway Harsh, M.A.

References:

Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions. Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree and Certificate Programs. March, 2001. Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications. http://www.wcet.info/resources/accreditation/Accrediting%20-%20Best%20Practices.pdfNational Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Faculty Survey of Student Engagement. 2004. Indiana University: Bloomington, IN. http://www.iub.edu/~nsse/fsse/2004_annual_report.pdfNational Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Student Engagement: Pathways to Collegiate Success: National Survey of Student Engagement 2004 Report. Indiana University: Bloomington, IN. http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/2004_annual_report/pdf/annual_report.pdf

Wellman, Jane, and Ehrlich, Thomas. Reexamining the Sacrosanct Credit Hour. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Washington D.C. V50: September 26, 2003. http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i05/05b01601.htm

TIP

E-mailing the Author of a Threaded Discussion

Have you ever wondered what the little envelope that appears to the left side of the Author's name in a Threaded Discussion is for? This functionality enables you to e-mail the Author directly from the Threaded Discussion without having to enter into the actual e-mail tab located at the top of the course.

The steps for e-mailing within a Threaded Discussion are as follows:

Step 1:	Locate the threaded discussion and the topic within that thread that you want to respond to.
Step 2:	Click the e-mail icon (the small envelope) next to the author or submitter's name.
Step 3:	Enter your e-mail message in the text box provided. You can include an attachment in your e-mail using the Browse button. You can also check the spelling in your response by clicking Check Spelling.
Step 4:	When you're finished composing your e-mail, click E-mail Response. The message is sent only to the author of the thread.

       – Theresa Turner