Curriculum Planning and Implementation

Based on Student Workload

Andrew Adrian Pua

2025-10-25

Main takeaways

In one slide

  1. It is hard to disagree with the statement – “Appropriate workload for teaching and learning are essential requirements for effective learning.”

  2. But measuring student workload requires assumptions, comparisons, and sanity checks.

  3. Tools, data, and direct involvement of instructors are needed to carry out the task of estimating student workload.

In one picture (from AUN)

My modification

Doing it

Why

  1. Workload estimation is the core underpinning the third pillar of the AUN-QEx roadmap.

  2. It is a form of reflective contextual simulation.

  3. You put yourself in the shoes of your students and in the place where your course is situated in a program.

  4. It is an opportunity to measure, evaluate, and optimize.

What we have – university guidelines

The student workload in a three (3) unit lecture course is 7.5 hours a week, for a total of 105 hours in a trimester. The total workload includes the time for classes, alternative activities, exams, projects, homework, reading assignments, and other class activities. It would be useful to present in the syllabus the estimated workload allocation for the students.

FAQ Term 3 Online Learning During COVID

How

  1. This how-to is based on AUN training.

  2. I will be explicit about what is my input.

  1. If you are going to do this:

    • Don’t do it alone. Prep in advance.
    • Get someone whose competence you can actually trust.
    • Get someone who disagrees (or maybe unaware) about the existence of the course.
    • Workshop with your entire department.

Before you start

  1. Define what is the average student at both the course and program level.
  2. Define what satisfactory result means.
  3. Grab the program flowchart and your syllabus.

I placed these first, so that you can have materials prepared ahead – it saves time.

Level of granularity

Next steps to estimate workload at the level of:

  1. The activity
  2. The course
  3. The program

This means that you are not operating alone anymore. You have to be aware of your impact on the entire program.

Activity-based Workload Estimation (AWE)

  1. P ick a variety of activities in your course.

  2. I magine how the average student will be accomplishing the activities with the goal of obtaining a satisfactory result.

  3. L ist down the processes involved in accomplishing the activity.

  4. I mpute times for each process.

Remember: PILI nuts are AWEsome.

From my AUN groupmates

We defined an average student. We were a group of 5.

Activity Mean (hours) SD (hours)
Synthesis paper 5.92 4.66
Video presentation 9.03 5.35
Laboratory work 5.68 2.61

How about other groups?

Synthesis paper 15 15.4 8.9 7 24
Video presentation 10 12.2 13.2 12 16.8
Laboratory work 9 7.2 8.9 6 9.1

Definitional differences, heterogeneous group composition, no reports of dispersion, inter-rater reliability might be important issue left unaddressed

Course-based workload estimation

  1. S elect three weeks worth of lessons or its equivalent.
  2. E xtend AWE calculations in this case.
  3. E stimate the course workload for students by the formula: \[\left(\mathrm{3\ week\ average}\right) \times \left(\mathrm{number\ of\ weeks}\right)\]

Remember: SEE what you may not necessarily see. SEE, PILI nuts are AWEsome.

Program-based workload estimation

  1. Compute workload for every trimester.
  2. What is the pattern of the workload across trimesters?

This can only be accomplished either by taking other courses as given or by reaching out to the departments which contribute to your program.

Data to make workload estimation meaningful

What data are out there

  1. Where did the “7.5 hours per week” come from?
  2. From Dabbay and Largoza (2024) EDCOM2 Report – “Assuming that in college the average ratio of instructional time to homework time in weekly hours is 1:2.5 (Stanford, Humboldt State University, De La Salle University), …”

7.5 hours per week is to reflect work? Commute time?

What data are out there

  1. CALOHEA project on Civil Engineering: “Figures from the study provide a detailed overview of the workload students have, which ranges between 30 and 46 hours per semester per unit, approximately averaging at about 40.125 hours.”

    • In trimester terms, this means roughly 20 to 31 hours per trimester per unit.
    • Or for every 3 units, 4.2 to 6.6 hours per week.
    • Or for a 18-unit trimester, 25.7 to 39.9 hours per week.

What data are out there

  1. Based on university guidelines, an 18-unit trimester corresponds to 45 hours per week.
  2. Does this mean that the university has a heavy student workload?

Clearly, we need better data. We need to also understand the provenance of the results from other countries.

Where to get data

  1. End of semester questionnaire – Not very useful, too late, instead report for every activity during term
  2. Student diary or logbook – Can we use this data? Are self-reports reliable?
  3. Interview or FGD – Always those who did very well, may not be representative

Perhaps using these simultaneously will help, but require competence in gathering, validating, storing, managing, and analyzing data.

Final remarks

Conclusions

  1. Useful exercises, but need to be modified for them to be informative internally and externally

  2. Must get faculty to buy-in and help in measurement, must get students to self-report truthfully (GIGO)

  3. Existential questions:

    • Should we introduce students to the reality of work?
    • “Our students are not us.” Sure, but shouldn’t they become better than us?

Conclusions

  1. Mass reflection:

    • We have to ask why some instructors do not want to reduce coverage, if it frees up their time.
    • We have to determine the distribution of bargaining power across instructors of courses in a program.
    • If we reduce workload, where does the reduced workload go?

Conclusions

  1. Statistics application:

    • How do you actually estimate workload?
    • Approach more scientifically. What should be the protocol?
    • What parametric models can we use?
    • Uncertainties?
    • Units matter.

Recommendations

  1. The meaning of credit hours varies across institutions, countries, and level of program. Who uses the information on credit hours?

  2. Choose:

    • Instructors of different courses coordinate with each other and program the timing of assessments within a term.
    • Some courses have to reduce coverage substantially.

  3. Categorize the courses into 3 levels (basic, intermediate, advanced). Each level has a different notion of workload.