Back in 2019 my long-time colleague Leigh Wolf published a blog post about student “time on task” that has stuck with me ever since; it keeps coming back into my mind again and again. The post, A Critical Digital Pedagogy Musing: Going Beyond 11:59pm, considers time on task for students and challenges us to be more transparent with students about how much time we expect the work we are giving them will take. The post gives a few tools/techniques that Leigh uses in her own teaching to work toward this – I highly recommend it. She writes:
“We often sell online courses/programs as convenient, they can ‘fit in your schedule,’ ‘anytime anywhere.’ Those of us who have been online learners know…that’s simply not the case, it’s way more complicated.”
The post is a reflection of Leigh’s experience in teaching graduate online courses but the implications are something that are important regardless of level or modality.
Here at UM-Dearborn, we have begun a conversation about shifting some classes (where it makes sense) from a 3 credit hour to a 4 credit hour designation. This of course brings up the definition of a credit hour and I couldn’t help but think about Leigh’s blog post. So, I thought I would circle back around and touch base with her to continue the conversation about considering time in teaching and learning.
This interview is also paired with an upcoming Hub event for UM-D faculty. Want to talk with Leigh, your colleagues, and our instructional designers in the Hub about “time on task”? UM-D faculty and staff can join Jessica Riviere on Zoom for “Time on Task: How much is it really” Thursday, February 17th from 11am-12pm. For more information and to register go to https://umdearborn.edu/events/all-events/time-task-how-much-it-really
My Interview with Leigh
Sometimes you are in a place of reading and in others you want to watch or listen. For this post I’m going to insert the whole video interview but also write up an abbreviated summary of our conversation if you are looking to read rather than watch.
Leigh Wolf is a Clinical Associate Professor at Arizona State University in the Leadership and Innovation EdD program. It is her fourth year at ASU, prior to which she worked at Michigan State University for over 12 years co-directing the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. Prior to that, she worked with Autumm at Oakland Community College as an Instructional Designer. Outside of the context of higher education she has worked in various jobs, such as a disc jockey and a gift wrapper at Hudsons. Leigh is thankful for her experiences outside of higher ed as she sees herself as a generalist and finds those experiences help her to relate to different perspectives that students bring as she leads them through their dissertation and doctoral process.
Autumm – I feel like the first big take away from your post is creating transparency to students about the expected time on task. Simply communicating to students an estimate of how long you think a reading or assignment should take them. Often this is left out of the design process but I’m wondering if you could just reflect a bit about how this has affected students and any insights you have gained since first writing the post in 2019.
Leigh – Sure. So, even before 2019 one of the things that got this idea rolling in my head is when I was teaching in the Masters in Ed Tech program was that we had a video assignment and I got a really, really frustrating, angry email from a student about – “this took me 25 hours and I just couldn’t figure things out” etc. And I was immediately like, “why didn’t you reach out for help”? Of course, in an online environment that’s not easy to do anyway, right? So this is what prompted me to think, okay, what can I build in my courses to help online learners with that self-regulation and letting them know they can reach out for help? A lot of times in online modalities it is just assumed that you have to be independent and autonomous and do everything on your own.
Students tell me they appreciate me articulating at least some boundaries around how much time they should be spending. Now, as I’m sure we’ll continue to discuss here, there are so many problems with those boundaries of time, for instance does it take into account neurodiversity, and who is setting those boundaries? I’m continuing to evolve these things as I move along because I think even in terms of being transparent with my ideas around those expectations, I also want my students have a heightened awareness of just how much time in general they’re spending on tasks.
I think it’s something that we often just don’t think about. We sit and maybe think that we’ve been staring at the screen for what feels like three hours, but maybe it was only 15 minutes. So it’s more about trying to help online learners in particular, really think about being transparent with themselves about the time that they’re putting into courses.
It all seems to be about counting, which may feel icky and gross and I’m also dealing with my own tensions about not wanting to put in any constraints. I would love for it to all be open and flexible but I also think that, that in the context of online learning, online graduate education in particular, it’s just really helpful to have some boundaries so that learners can continue to move forward.
So, you asked me about how things have changed or evolved since writing the post? And I think particularly in this past year, after the pandemic initially hit, that I’m getting even more comments about the appreciation of those boundaries because, everything else feels boundless in a sense. I’ve been really trying to emphasize that “Honestly, I want you to finish”. If I give you an hour to do a task, just do as much as you can in that hour. If it’s one sentence, that is okay. You’re going to continue. It’s whatever you can do within that time. And then that helps me make those back-end instructional adjustments so that I can modify prompts or determine what we can work on together to modify assignments.
It is about what’s going to make the student flourish and be most productive in this hour. So I think it’s just continually adapting what that hour means. And then linking that back, again, to thinking about those accessibility issues and the differences that learners are going to bring to time on tasks. So I think it’s just getting more layered and nuanced as I continue the practice.
Autumm – Can we talk a bit about the how of doing this? How do you go about creating the estimates and assessing how accurate they are?
Leigh – It really is tightly tied to the Carnegie unit. I use that as a guide and it is what our registrar’s office puts out. Essentially, a three credit course is equivalent to nine hours of work a week. Three hours being, quote/unquote “lecture”, and then the other six hours are homework. Well, I just started with that nine our unit and I always create “learning patterns” in my courses. So I have “reading” as a pattern because reading is something that we do on a weekly basis. I have a “listening pattern”, a “questioning pattern”, and then “applying” and “playing”. And so if you want to think of a pie chart, I lay out how much time do I want students to put into each of those types of activities? The playing that we do is important, but I want it to be a quick activity. I don’t want them to spend a lot of time on this particular exercise because I want that sort of quick creativity piece to feed into the application assignment that they do where I want them to take a little bit more time.
There’s a big emphasis in my class, on “review reading”, but what I call it is “reading selfishly” as you’re looking from your own point of view. A lot of times I’ve noticed students in my course think they need to read to memorize and read to be able to answer every question as if someone would be grilling them on on the readings. But I’m trying to re-frame things and point out that you’re reading for your own work. That might mean that you don’t have to read the whole article, that there might be pieces you’re skimming here and there. It is just helping to give those boundaries. So when I say spend three hours reading every week, that doesn’t mean you need to read these five documents end-to-end within three hours; it is more like: spend three hours over the week taking in, skimming the resources, and dedicating your time to pulling ideas out of and questioning the reading.
“You are telling me that UM-D has an initiative to move some classes from three to four credit hours and I bet the the initial gut reaction for many may be “Oh, we get an extra credit hour so we can put more content in the course”. But increasingly I’ve stripped more and more out so that students can have the space to go into depth…“
Then, what I do is have the students ask me questions on Slack based upon their understanding of the readings and I create a weekly video where I answer the questions. The videos are about an hour long, which as you know, goes against a lot of online pedagogy recommendations which would have you break videos down into manageable chunks but I think this also shows where flexibility is important.
But again this goes back to the importance of time. When I take that time in a video I need to also consider their weekly budget for the other work in the course as well. So, I am really trying to show them and model that I value their time. And so while this video might be an hour long, that means I don’t want you to spend as much time doing something else.
All of this helps me to manage those expectations because I think we always want to do more and more and more; cram more and more into the class. You are telling me that UM-D has an initiative to move some classes from three to four credit hours and I bet the the initial gut reaction for many may be “Oh, we get an extra credit hour so we can put more content in the course”. But increasingly I’ve stripped more and more out so that students can have the space to go into depth rather than just trying to check the box and turn it in. Because, and again some of this is specifically in my own context, this course is where they’re transitioning to writing more of their dissertation proposal and that work escapes boundaries but takes time management. I’m trying to model for them behaviors that they can apply to independent work down the road.
Autumm – One other thing you talk about that I find really important is how you communicate a time on task for yourself for grading so that students better understand how much you are juggling.
Leigh – Sure. It’s still something that is sort of the next layer of focus that I’m looking at. Because I’m not perfect at it, I mean I’ve got my days down – like everything is due on a Sunday and I dedicate Monday and Tuesday to feedback, but then I’m also doing other tasks in between. So one of the things I want to do this semester is really get a better gauge for how long things are taking me. That weekly video that I’ve talked about, I’ve got that down to sort of a pattern and I know how long that takes. And the work that I put into that is very visible to students. That’s something I have noticed as well, if we’re talking about, you know, the community of inquiry framework and instructor presence, that definitely brings the instructor presence right into the mix of the discussion. They realize that I’m learning with them along the way. And I think online, that’s not as easy to do because it is easy for it to feel like the content is there and it’s coming to you – the content is happening to you, rather than being constructed together asynchronously. So I think by modeling that they are seeing my “time on task” and investment in the class as well. But this is another reason why I so appreciate you engaging me in this discussion because it’s helping me to think about, okay, what else do I need to think about, what else do I need to write about, talk about? As this moves forward, the one thing that is so important in all of this is that I definitely don’t see an endpoint. I have not figured it completely out and there’s continual complexities that get thrown into this mix. In talking with you, in talking with my students, I’m always asking how can I continue to evolve this practice?
~~~
And don’t forget!! UM-D faculty and staff can join Jessica Riviere and Leigh Wolf on Zoom for “Time on Task: How much is it really” Thursday, February 17th from 11am-12pm. For more information and to register go to https://umdearborn.edu/events/all-events/time-task-how-much-it-really