How (and why?) do we estimate how many hours students are spending on our course content?

Rice’s course workload estimator at https://cte.rice.edu/workload

As a measure of accountability to our stakeholders, faculty are sometimes asked to estimate how many hours students will spend completing their course work, no matter whether the course is online or in face to face. Calculating a reasonable course workload estimate can be challenging, but there are tools to help. View OSU’s guidelines for credit hour estimation from the Office of Distance Education and eLearning to find out why we need to estimate the hours a student will spend working in a course.

You may want a more practical tool for estimating the number of hours students spend completing course work components and adding them up. If that is the case, try Rice University’s Course Workload Estimator.  You can use their online interface to estimate course workload by inputting the amount of reading, writing, exams, and other assignments a student must complete in a semester, and the estimator will output the estimated workload for students in terms of out-of-class hours per week.  Detailed explanations for how the tool calculates the workload are provided.