Total Work Hours (TWH)

Our recommendation for people planning their courses is to stop thinking about ‘contact hours’. A contact hour is a constraint that is applied to the learning process because of the organizational need to have people share a space within a building. Also called a credit hour, (particularly for American universities) this has meant, from a workload perspective, that for every hour a student spends in class, they are meant to do two (in some cases three!) hours of study outside of class. Even Cliff Notes agrees. So, if a student is taking a full course load, they would have 45 to 60 Total Work Hours each week. And for one 12-week course, there would be approximately 108 to 144 TWHs.

But now we’re teaching online. Maybe we’re not even doing synchronous classes. How do we decide how much work to give students? Three hours of videos plus 6 hours of readings?

I’m not suggesting you need to give students 9 hours of work a week. I’m saying that this is the current system. If you have two 90 minute face-to-face classes a week, you must have some expectation that students were reading something, working on a paper, or doing something else outside of class. Your first job is to figure out what you want that number to be. In this book, we are going to pick 6-TWHs.

Who says we’re even allowed to do that?

The online guidelines from that same US government standards document linked above are interesting…

Distance education means education that uses one or more of the technologies listed in paragraphs (1) through (4) of this definition to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor, either synchronously or asynchronously.

And then…

“in lieu of credit hours or clock hours as a measure of student learning, utilize direct assessment of student learning, or recognize the direct assessment of student learning by others, if such assessment is consistent with the accreditation of the institution or program utilizing the results of the assessment and with the provisions of §668.10.”

So, according to this, you can basically do whatever you want; unless, of course, you have specific accreditation guidelines, then you have to follow those.

But even if you do have those guidelines, you still have to translate them to your course. At the end of the day, you are the arbiter of what happens in your classroom, and the expression “recognize the direct assessment of student learning by others” gives you a fair amount of latitude. So, let’s go with 6 Total Work Hours.

Scaffolding to 6 TWH – Activity Method

Those 6 total work hours are going to work out to 90 hours of work over an average term of 15 weeks (our terms are 12 weeks, but I think 15 includes the break week and the “final exam period” – so do we want to spell that out here, in case people are like “but my semester is only 12 weeks!”). (please note, the Carnegie unit wants that to be 120 hours, but we’re going to ignore that). We have 90 hours to work with over the term for a course. How do you want to break that down? It’s going to be drastically different for different courses and styles. But whatever you’re teaching, keep trying to think about it from the perspective of what a student is actually going TO DO.

A simple break down:

A thousand variations of this might be imagined, and there are certainly some of these activities that are going to take less/more time depending on the contexts of each individual student. But imagine being a student (particularly a first-year student) and getting a breakdown like this to help you see what you’re supposed to be doing. If you don’t like that, or think it’s too ‘easy’ for students, you don’t have to give it to them.

note: Dave hasn’t given a midterm or final exam for 10 years, but we’ve included those because many folks still do. We challenge you to think of the myriad of ways in which you might assess your students, in the Online Assessment chapter.