40 Time Allocation
On average, a student should spend approximately 120 hours on material for your course. That includes all of the time they spend both in the classroom and preparing for your class. If you calculate this based on a standard half-credit course, this works out to approximately 10 hours per week. Since students are juggling as many as five courses per term, this works out to a heavy load of 50 hours of work a week!
To ensure an equitable workload, estimate approximately how long it will take your students to complete each of the major components of the class. For all writing, make sure you budget for research, writing and editing time. For tests and examinations, make sure you budget time to study!
Sample Time Allocation
Here is an example of a course time allocation to get you started.
| Task | Approximate Time Committment | Total Time Committment |
| Group project meetings | 4 meetings – 1 hour | 4 hours |
| Group project scheduling | 1 hour | 1 hour |
| Self/Peer Evaluation of group project | 30 min | 0.5 hour |
| Weekly readings | 3 hours/week | 36 hours |
| Collaborate Sessions | 2 hours/week | 24 hours |
| Discussion Forums | 6 posts throughout the term – 1 hour | 6 hours |
| Read book for review | 8 hours | 8 hours |
| Book Review (2 pages) | 10 hours | 10 hours |
| Research Paper (8 pages) | 20 hours | 20 hours |
| Preparation for final exam | 6 hours | 6 hours |
| Final exam | 3 hours | 3 hours |
| Total Hours | 118.5 hours |
Exercises
Download the Time Allocation Template and use it to generalize about your workload. If you would like to perform a more in-depth calculation, we recommend using this Workload Calculator resource.
