How Much Time Do You Spend Per Class Unit?

I usually teach 5 unit classes at the local community college. We meet for 2 hours and 15 minutes two times a week.

The number of units a class has is the number of contact hours you have with the instructor. It presupposes students spend 2 hours per contact hour on homework.

That means my students are supposed to be spending 10 hours a week on the class in order to master the material and be prepared to move on to the next level of writing.

So I assign homework with the expectation that students will commit to devoting ten hours a week on reading, writing, and researching.

Other community faculty have admitted to me that they assign homework expecting the students will spend about one hour on homework per contact hour. We know that community college students typically have more responsibilities and work more than the typical university student. My night students usually have a full time job AND families AND often they are taking a full load of classes.

That’s 12 units x 3 = 36 hours per week for classes + 40 hours for work + x responsibilities etc. It’s an equation that quickly goes beyond the hours of the week even if you reduce sleep from 8-9 hours to 6 or 7.

In contrast, university classes are more in line with these expectations of time devoted to class. When I attended community college, I could race through the readings and rip out the few papers in very little time (which was a good thing since I was working almost full time and took 18 or more units each semester). When I transferred to UC Santa Cruz, I was shocked by how much time I had to spend to do the reading and the writing required to prepare for class–I was unprepared by my community college experience for the expectations of college.

In this article “YouTube U: The Power Of Stanford’s Free Online Education” about free classes in engineering being offered this semester at Stanford University, author EdSurge says that even Instructor

“Thrun warned many off by cheerfully promising they’d have to clock the same amount of time on homework as a “good” Stanford student—up to 12 hours per week”

the class had an initial enrollment of 160,000 with 35,000 turning in the first week’s homework.

Any ideas on how to motivate community college students to commit the time and devote up to 10 hours a week on a writing class?

(Note to my English 2 students: you can read and respond to this blog post and to the article referenced for one of your 20 reading responses. Remember to use quotes and cite your sources.)