Sometimes the simplest concepts are the most problematic. Take, for example, the notion of the "credit hour." It seems like a self-evident term: one earns a college "credit" for an "hour" of academic work. But quantifying work is a very complicated affair and one "hour" of work is often a misnomer.

I've been thinking about this problem a lot recently, not only because I've hit that time of year when the grading stack avalanches down on me and I wonder whether or not I'm assigning too much. As I peruse student developmental portfolios, browse student course weblogs, and chat with faculty about the amount of reading and homework they're assigning, I really start to wonder how much is "just right" for three credit hours worth of work. Some colleagues in literature assign two or three short stories per week of reading; others assign a whole novel. When I see how much "work" students are putting into their other classes, I can't help but compare it to my own, and sometimes I end up feeling like I'm either a fascist slave driver or a dribbling softie, depending on the comparison. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm somewhere in-between and getting it just right, but since faculty seem to have such wildly disparate concepts of student workload, it's impossible to know for sure.

Although it's the gold standard for determining faculty workload and student progress toward a diploma, The "credit hour" is a slippery a concept because college students and teachers put far more "work" into a course than the typical three hours-per-week, student-in-seat interfacing. Homework, preparatory readings, office consultations...the whole gambit of learning tasks complicates matters. I try to use what I think is the "classic formula" for estimating student work: 1 hour of in-class time + 2 hours of study outside of class = one credit hour. But as Peter Ewell (from the PEW Forum on Undergraduate Learning) notes in his excellent inquiry, "Notes on the Credit Hour", there are too many inconsistencies among class approaches and that the credit hour system might be an inappropriate measurement standard for learning. Even if we set aside the impossibility of accounting for student labor outside of the classroom (though research suggests they aren't working very hard), the standards of measurement aren't "standard" at all. Different campuses design different measures of a "credit." Heck, just defining "in class" activity is slippery: some labs, internships, stage rehearsals, independent studies and other non-standard instructional activities are incongruous with the typical credit hour system.

At bottom the problem is the assumption that an hour spent in class equates with an hour of learning. But the "credit hour" could be an anachronism, given the various asynchronous methods of learning (as in online courses), and other changes that electronic media and new approaches to teaching have on the notion of "time" spent learning. Jane Wellman and Thomas Ehrlich have put a lot of work into investigating the shifts in the time and space of learning. In a Chronicle article related to their book, How the Student Credit Hour Shapes Higher Education, they recommend radical alternatives, predominantly because so much rides on the credit hour -- from faculty salaries to government funding. They smartly advocate replacing the term "hours" with "units" and suggest that emphasis on a "competency-based" system of learning assessment might be more meaningful. I haven't read this book yet, but the publisher's online excerpt from the introduction (.pdf format) suggests the following rationales for revising the system:

• The credit hour is a barrier to innovation in teaching and learning.
  
• The credit hour is a basic element of state budgets, and the measure gets in the way of budget reform.
  
• The credit hour is more often enforced as a regulatory measure in public institutions than in private institutions and within the public sector in two-year institutions more often than in four-year institutions.
  
• Innovative institutions work with and around the credit hour as a measure of student learning, but relatively few alternatives to the credit hour have occurred with respect to faculty workload.
  
• Credit hours are awarded inconsistently, with little internal policy guidance or external review about the basis for awarding them.
  

These are big institutional issues, and so much red tape has been secured to the "credit hour" that reform will be slow to come. Institutional funding and faculty workload issues are one thing, but what about student learning? Since financial aid and other forms of support require students to be enrolled "full time," at our college (which is typical of most, I think) students take 12-16 credit hours, or roughly four courses a term. This, in effect, makes sure they process out with their diplomas in four years. But some students leap for overloads because they aren't challenged, while others crumble under the weight of four when when they might more easily juggle three courses instead. At issue isn't so much the "in class" time, but the ambiguous amount of out of class work attached to any given course. While researching this topic, I found a newspaper article ("How Much Homework is Too Much?") that suggests that students can only do so much homework before their learning "plateaus" -- that is, there comes a point where doing extra homework won't do you any good. They loosely cite one study (my research suggests that it's this report from the Nat'l Center for Education Statistics), in which kids who worked on schoolwork for more than three hours a night scored lower overall than kids who had studied just 1 to 3 hours per night. I'm not sure if this holds water, because the stats tell me that the older kids get, the more extra studying pays off, but it does support the notion that maybe two hours of studying for each one hour class meeting might be "just right" for maximizing learning. Even so, time is always relative. So is learning. A "credit hour" can only operationally be defined.

As far as determining the amount of material that I put into my class assignments, I'll just have to keep trusting my gut. And keeping my ear to the ground. Talking about these things with students and faculty and administration -- and measuring them comparatively in such interdisciplinary assessment tools as developmental portfolios -- is the only way I know how to gauge whether my three credits are the same as anyone else's.

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