Background
The definition of a credit hour is relevant to the preparation of curricula for the transition to semesters at Auburn University.
Under the guidelines for the preparation of curricula for the conversion to semesters, academic units are often being asked to reduce the total number of credit hours from the current requirements of the quarter-based curricula. This requirement is designed to enable students to graduate in a timely manner (within 4 years for a full time student). As such, it is tempting to merely reduce hours of credit rather than to perform an admittedly difficult curriculum redesign. The issues involved in defining a "credit hour" are thus
To ensure that student workload is sufficient for the credit hours assigned.
To ensure that student workload is not excessive for the credit hours assigned.
With this in mind, the number of credit hours assigned to coursework needs to be selected to be proportional to "student workload," which entails instructor contact hours, laboratory work, clinical/internship work, and other out-of-class work associated with a course. Unfortunately, it is not practical and undesirable to precisely measure these quantities in an ongoing fashion. Further, student capability, motivation and background will have a strong impact on the amount of time required by a student to complete their assigned out-of-class and in-laboratory work. Therefore, the policy guidelines proposed herein should be considered to be principles that are not to be interpreted as strict rules, particularly for junior/senior courses.
It should be noted that credit hours are used for several purposes at Auburn University:
Assessment of student workload (e.g., full-time, part-time students)
Assessment of faculty teaching workload
Assessment of departmental costs
It should be noted that no single measure can simultaneously address all three of the above quantities with any meaningful accuracy; e.g., student workload and faculty workload are clearly different . The treatment of this issue is beyond the charge of the Academic Standards Committee, and so it is discussed here merely to bring it to the attention of the Provost.
Typical workload
The proposed guidelines for curricula suggest a total number of 120 semester hours in a curriculum model. Therefore,. for the purposes of this document, a normal courseload will be considered to be 15 credit hours per semester, since this corresponds to the average course load for a student with a 120 semester hour curriculum over a period of 8 semesters. We propose the following general guideline:
A credit hour during an academic year semester should correspond to a total student effort of roughly 3-3.5 hours of total work per week related to the associated course. For example, a student taking 15 credit hours in an academic year semester (as opposed to a summer semester) would correspond to a total workload of 45-53 hours of work per week for the typical student.
Summer semesters will have an increased workload per week in order to match the total workload for an academic year semester.
The Academic Standards Committee wishes to emphasize that the above guideline is not intended to require that student workload be measured; rather, it is a guideline that is applied below when determining the number of credit hours to be assigned to a course.
Types of instruction
The assignment of credit hours to a course must take into account the type of instruction used. For this purpose, we propose that instruction be classified into one of four categories:
Lecture/discussion instruction
Lab instruction
Studio
Other
Lecture/discussion instruction
This type of instruction typically involves interaction between an instructor or instructors and a group of students in a classroom environment, including formal lecture, discussion sections
recitation/problem solving sessions, review sessions.
Instructional technology (e.g., projectors, chalkboards, recorded media, etc.) may be used, but the primary instructional mechanism is oral and/or written communication between instructor(s) and students.
Lab instruction
This type of instruction typically involves student interaction with equipment related to the discipline of instruction, usually under the supervision of an instructor in the laboratory setting. Examples include but are not limited to:
Computer-based drills (computer aided education such as currently used in foreign languages)
Experimental development that requires laboratory set-up and use of equipment such as commonly occurs in chemistry, biology, engineering, and other disciplines in which specialized equipment must be used to measure, evaluate and assess experimental data
Excluded from lab instruction are classes that fit primarily within the lecture/discussion format discussed above.
Studio
The teaching of studio disciplines is not necessarily conducted in a strict, formalized manner. It is demanding and well described in accreditation standards. Studio instruction may include some or all of the following:
Formal lectures
Viewing of slides, tapes, or interactive media
Formal critiques of student work by invited jurors from the faculty and industry professionals
Group critique and discussion sessions as well as one-on-one interaction between instructor and student or between students
A wide variety of hands-on experience involving both 2-D and 3-D media and their applications in drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpting, making ceramics, woodworking, die-casting, model-building, or executing projects in design, typography and illustration instructional demonstrations of skill techniques conceptual exploration and design solution development on individual and/or structured student teaming experiences interdisciplinary student teaming experiences field trips and site visits.
The studio provides many students with their first opportunity to experience interpersonal circumstances of a design office environment. In many curricula the studio classroom represents and academic space fully equipped and dedicated to the singular use of an individual student or a group of students for the full length of a quarter, 7 days per week, 24 hours per day.
Other
Several disciplines require the use of forms of instruction that do not fit well within the above two categories. These would include, for example
Internships (on and off campus)
Nursing clinical practica etc.
These instructional activities are sometimes associated with "capstone" projects or activities that require students to employ their total knowledge of their field of specialty, whereas some programs make use of such activities (e.g., clinical practica) throughout their curricula. The definition of a credit hour for these activities will differ significantly from that defined for the usual lecture/discussion and/or lab formats.
Definition proposals
The two primary forms of instruction, lecture-discussion and laboratory, will have credit hours assigned as follows.
Lecture-discussion
During the academic year, each credit hour corresponds to 50 minutes of lecture per week with an associated typical weekly out-of-class workload of 2-3 hours. For example, a 3 credit hour class would have a total of 150 minutes of lecture per week with 6-9 hours of out of class work (e.g., unsupervised computer-aided-instruction, homework in the form of problem sets, writing assignments, projects, etc.).
Laboratory
A laboratory credit hour, in order to have a corresponding workload with lecture-discussion sections, will correspond to a 2-3 hour period of time during which a student will work either alone or in a small group with the appropriate laboratory equipment to perform a single experiment or technical activity , acting under the supervision of the lab supervisor/instructor. There will likely be an associated homework load of approximately 1 hour per week to be performed out of class. Labs should be designed so that the workload due to the combination of homework/lab time is neither insufficient nor excessive relative to the credit hours assigned to the laboratory.
Studio
Studio credit hours are defined as up to 4 contact hours per week per studio credit hour.
Other
The alternative forms of instruction defined above should be assigned credit as follows: Working from a base "normal" workload of 15 credit hours per academic year semester (likely less during the summer semester), credit hours should be assigned to practica, internships, etc., appropriate to the total portion of a full-time student workload occupied by the associated instructional, educational or professional activity. For example, if a student is expected to perform an internship simultaneously with a 3 credit hour "normal" class (need to work on the wording here), then associated credit to the internship should be 12 credit hours.
In the case of off-campus internships, a formal university-wide policy would be counterproductive to the development of curricula. We therefore propose that individual units that make use of internships in their curricula submit their own guidelines for the assignment of credit hours to the associated internships. Credit hours may reflect, e.g., professional content/development, Auburn University administrative costs, student workload, professional standards, accreditation requirements, etc.
Policy intent/exceptions
As stated earlier, the issues involved with this policy are to ensure that student workload for a given number of credit hours is appropriate for the credit hours assigned. However, it must be recognized that a uniform workload across all curricula for identical numbers of credit hours is not possible; by the nature of the curricula involved and the national expectations of a baccalaureate degree in a given major, some courses with, e.g., 3 credit hours will be significantly easier/more difficult for that particular student that courses with 3 credit hours that are offered in other programs. Further, due to the quantization required by selecting whole units of credit hours, some courses (e.g., major-specific 1 hour labs) may be significantly more difficult than their credit hour assignment may initially indicate.
It is not the intent of this policy to require a precise assessment of student workload. Rather, it is intended that this policy provide a set of general guidelines for the assignment of credit hours to courses in curricula. It may be desired in some curriculum models to allow for some courses, e.g., laboratory, thesis/dissertation credit, practica, studios, etc., to have a high workload associated with them relative to the number of credit hours assigned. In these cases, the following guidelines should be followed:
Approval for the excess workload must be approved by all affected departments and/or programs. This is especially important in the case of service courses. Curriculum models should be designed so that the total workload of all courses assigned in a given quarter is
appropriate as defined under Section 2, Typical workload, above.
With these exceptions in mind, the definition of a credit hour carries with it significant flexibility while ensuring that a students overall course load will be commensurate with the number of credit hours being taken during a given quarter.
Examples
1.A course meets Tuesday and Thursdays for 75 minute lecture/discussion sections and has an associated laboratory experiment once per week from 1-4pm on Mondays. Faculty assign total homework load per week, including pre-lab preparation and at-home lab report preparation, that they expect to take an average of approximately 10 hours per week.
The course is assigned 4 credit hours, since this corresponds to 3x50=150 minutes per lecture per week, 3 hours of lab, and 3x3+1=10 hours of assigned out-of-class work.
2.A laboratory course meets twice per week for two hours each meeting. The experiments in each lab are independent, and each lab has an associated pre-lab and out-of-class final report assignment. The course is assigned 2 credit hours.
3.A course has a laboratory that meets several times each week for a total of four hours during the week. All meetings are associated with an ongoing experiment (e.g., microbiology culture being grown for analysis) that cannot be accomplished in a single lab period.
The course is assigned 1 credit hour for the laboratory. Although it meets more than once per week, the time is devoted to a single ongoing experiment, and so the associated workload is not as severe as for the example above.
4.A course has a laboratory that meets twice each week for a total of four hours during the week. The two labs are independent of one another. However, there is no out-of-class assignment (prelab and final report are performed in lab).
The course is assigned 1 credit hour for the laboratory. Although it meets more than once per week, the total workload is appropriate for a single credit hour.
5.A course meets three times per week for a 50 minute lecture by a professor or other instructor; once each week the course meets with a graduate teaching assistant for problem solving sessions to clarify material presented in homework assignments and lecture.
The course is assigned 4 credit hours. Since the discussion section is a regularly scheduled event, it is a part of the contact hours of the class.
Grading of internships
Due to the unique nature of many internships, the assignment of letter grades may or may not be reasonable. It is therefore counterproductive to propose a University-wide policy on the assignment of grades to internship courses, especially off-campus internships. We therefore propose that individual units that make use of internships in their curricula submit their own guidelines for the types of grades assigned to the associated internships. Alternatives to letter grades may include, e.g., letters of reference from coworkers/supervisors at an off-campus installation, etc.