How Much Should We Assign? Estimate Student Workload in the New Semester

Break

Finally, the marking is finished. Now we are taking a break between two semesters. You might be in the conference/research/holiday modes. However, you are supposed to submit the unit guides for S2 in just a couple of weeks and then prepare for the unit contents. We know that and we hope this Course Workload Estimator can help you to estimate the student workload when planning for the new semester.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Course Workload Estimator

Planning your readings, assignments, and exams for your units can be challenging. And you will have to consider student workload for those learning activities. How much should we assign to the students?

We know that university has its recommendation based on the unit credit. An average study time of 24-36 hours a week is a reasonable expectation for our students. However, the research shows that the average college student in America only spends 12-15 hours per week studying.

The Course Workload Estimator developed by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University can help you to estimate the student workload based on the designs of your reading assignments, writing assignments, other assignments, and exams. We hope that the estimated results can assist you to plan your reading and writing tasks.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It is a tool to fill the blank. We have not seen any similar estimator for student workload.
2. It is easy to use and it takes only two mins to estimate student weekly study hours.
3. It is free.

What is not so good?

The question might be: is it really accurate? We do not know the answer, unfortunately. However, we can give it a try and see how it works in the next semester.

What's in it for us?

Students take much longer to complete a task than you do that. Even though it is not possible to estimate the workload without getting into the assignment details, you can still use this estimator to evaluate the assignment design. Then based on the results, you can change the structure, number, size, or expectations for the assignments.

It is a simple tool to use. We can spend two minutes to input the information with the designed reading materials, writing and other assignments, and exams. The web page generates the estimated student workload in the format of out of class hours per week.

And if you would like to change the design of assessments in your unit, you can just change the input and the system will calculate the workload again automatically.

If you are interested in the research of student workload and the tool, you can find more information in this further reading article.