No Magic Number: Student Workload and Learning

Carolyn Stoll, Director Online Instruction, University of Cincinnati

In my role helping to lead an instructional design team at the University of Cincinnati, I was recently asked to take a look at a graduate-level online course from which a significant number of students had dropped, and not just dropped the course but dropped the entire program. The reason? Students said the workload was too high. Naturally concerned, the administrator who requested that we look at this course wanted to know if the workload was “right” for an online course. The underlying assumption in her request was that there was a “right” amount of work for an online course to make sure students were learning.

Let us unpack that assumption for a minute. Asking how many hours a student should be working in an online course implies that the answer would be different from the number of hours a student should be working in an on-ground one. This is a common misconception. Many people skeptical of online education base some of their objections on the idea that without the regular rhythm of face-to-face class meetings, online students must be doing less work, which implies less learning. The old calculus of 2-3 hours of study outside of class for every hour in class falls apart when there is no “class” to be in. So, what do we replace that calculus with? That is the question the administrator was asking.

I do not fault the administrator for asking questions when a significant number of students drop out of her program. I just wonder if we are asking the right questions. If the question is only how much time students should be spending, then that must mean time spent studying equals learning. And that in turn must mean that a student who puts in the optimal amount of time should walk away having learned something.

But we all know that is not true. Some students study for hours on end and barely scrape by, or worse, fail. Other students hardly crack a book and sail through with high marks. And still, others can put in exactly the amount of study time deemed optimal and get solid grades but would be hard-pressed to tell you what they learned. And this is true regardless of modality, online or on-ground.

So, what questions should we be asking? How do we determine if a course, any course, requires an appropriate amount of work to ensure student learning? The answers lie not in how much time students spend, but in how that time is spent. That means examining the course’s alignment with its objectives and whether the course is assessing students with relevant, meaningful assignments.

“The best assignments make an emotional connection by activating that part of our brains that connects memory with emotion. Significant assignments also connect previous knowledge with new information, helping students to build upon what they already know and retain it.”

Examining alignment is a lot like making sure that your Google maps have the right destination plugged into it. If you do not tell Google the right address, you are not going to wind up where you want. Likewise, if your course objectives are not right, students are not going to wind up where you want either.

Measurable objectives allow you to observe whether students are demonstrating they have met them. Student workload then gets tied to the number and level of objectives students must meet. If you have too many objectives or objectives that are cognitively too challenging for the time allowed, then students will be overwhelmed. There will be too much reading, too much homework, and too many assessments of too high a difficulty for students to do anything but survive. Conversely, if you have too few objectives or objectives that never challenge students cognitively, then they will become disengaged and probably bored.

Then, ask yourself, how will I know whether my students have met the objective? Aligned assessments are the answer. Aligned assessments allow us to observe if students are meeting objectives. If we are asking students to discuss, then the assessment cannot be a multiple-choice test. They must discuss with others to align with that objective.

Not only do assessments need to align with the course’s objectives, but they should be what Perry Shaw and Amanda Rasmussen recently called in Faculty Focus “assignments with significance.” The best assignments make an emotional connection by activating that part of our brains that connects memory with emotion. Significant assignments also connect previous knowledge with new information, helping students to build upon what they already know and retain it. And finally, assignments that are relevant to students and mimic real-world tasks not only assess whether students have met the objective but help them to apply learned concepts to new situations, a step on the way to true expertise.

So, we began to look at not just the time students were spending in the course in question, but also how they were spending it. Since we were asked about the workload, we used a course workload estimator and found that in some weeks, students in this course were asked to complete as many as 40 hours of readings, writing, and other assessments. With this amount of work, it is surprising that MORE students had not dropped out.

But the bigger problems were misaligned assessments and content that led to too many tasks for the student to manage. This can happen when you do not focus on alignment when designing a course. The content runs away with you, putting students in survival mode to get tasks done, not to learn. Our final recommendations were to revise the course from scratch, including rewriting objectives and re-aligning assessments and content, focusing on significant assignments.

What is true for this online course is true for any course, online or on-ground. There is no magic number of hours students should be working, so we should stop focusing on time as a proxy for learning. There are only the course objectives, how we help students to meet them, and how we know whether they did. So, when students fall away or fail to succeed, and we want to know why those are the places where we must seek our answers.