Ohio Department of Higher Education policies, U.S. Department of Education laws, and higher education accreditation standards require institutions utilizing federal financial aid to document how in-class and out-of-class time equivalencies are determined for both in-person and distance learning courses.
According to Ohio State policy (go.osu.edu/credithours), One credit hour shall be assigned for each three hours per week of the average student's time, including class hours, required to earn the average grade of "C" in this course. For example, if you are teaching a three credit-hour course, this means that students should expect to spend nine (9) hours each week engaging with your course.
When developing an online course, it is essential to carefully consider student workload estimations to ensure that what you are requiring of your students is appropriate for your respective course credit hours. The new requirement to describe the regular and substantive interaction in the course support designing a course that includes the appropriate amount of student work as critical to effective course design.
In addition to sketching out a breakdown of weekly estimated workload in the Distance Learning Cover Sheet, we recommend providing an overview of how students should plan to budget and allocate their time in the How This Online Course Works section of the syllabus. This will increase transparency of student expectations and support student metacognition and time management, leading towards a greater chance of success in the course.
A team of faculty at Rice University developed a workload estimator tool that was later improved by a professor at Wake Forest (see below). After filling out the fields shown, the tool will estimate the contact hours, independent (homework) hours, and total number of hours it takes a student to complete your course. While this is not a perfect tool, it can help you think through the student experience of completing the requirements of your course.
This website offers a course workload estimator, a description of estimation details, and a literature review of reading and writing rates. It is to be noted that the authors transparently state, “To arrive at our estimates, we began with what we knew from the literature and then filled in the gaps by making a few key assumptions.”
Additional Resources on This Topic
Rapanta, C., Botturi, L., Goodyear, P., Guàrdia, L., & Koole, M. (2020). Online University Teaching During and After the Covid-19 Crisis: Refocusing Teacher Presence and Learning Activity. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 923–945.
In this article, the co-researchers, as online pedagogy experts, share their best practices, experiences, and viewpoints on online teaching. Written at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study provides useful online teaching strategies different from the reactive strategies employed during emergency online teaching. Three areas emerge from the co-researchers’ contributions that are further discussed in the study. They are learning design, teacher presence, and assessment.
Learning activities should be ‘based on a mix of design approaches (synchronous, asynchronous, online, offline), be described and communicated in an accurate and clear manner, have an adequate level of difficulty for students’ capabilities and expectations, be related to authentic contexts to increase students’ engagement, and be accessible to everyone’ (p.937). According to the authors, instead of having all learning activities and goals pre-determined, the online instructor should have ‘design flexibility’ (p.938) to be inclusive of students’ needs.
The second theme is teacher presence: ‘how are teachers actually teaching their courses, e.g., establishing a relationship with their students’ (p.938)? The participants in the study revealed that there are three types of presence for online teaching: cognitive, social, and facilitatory. Cognitive presence means ‘focusing on how teachers take into consideration students’ preparedness to participate’ (p.938). Social presence refers to ‘the social communication channels that teachers must open to maintain [for] student-student and student-teacher interaction’ (p.938). Facilitatory presence is when instructors use ‘facilitatory discourse, direction instruction embodying tools/resources and mentoring activities’ (p.939).
Within the last theme, assessment, the authors suggest a continuous assessment model be utilized that also addresses students’ self-regulation skills. Instructors are encouraged to ‘be proactive and distribute activities over time and space’ that ‘shift the focus onto students as responsible for their own learning’ (p.939).
Literature Review completed by ASC Office of Distance Education Graduate Research Assistant Terrena Conson. Suggestions for other research to include are welcomed and appreciated!