[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 375 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Betsy Barry is back, and she joins me for a conversation about why to use a Course Workload Estimator and, oh, so much more that won’t fit in a podcast episode title.

[00:00:20] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:29] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m, Bonni Stachowiak. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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After receiving her PhD in 2009, Betsy spent five years teaching philosophy and religious studies at Lake Forest College, Marymount Manhattan College, and Rice University. When Rice launched its Center for Teaching Excellence in 2014, she was appointed a founding assistant director. In 2016, she was promoted to associate director, and in 2018, she began her current position at Wake Forest.

Trained as a comparative ethicist, Betsy’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of moral philosophy, political theory, and the history of religion. Her disciplinary scholarship compares Catholic and Muslim arguments about the nature of law within diverse societies. More recently, she has explored related questions and the philosophy of education. More specifically, Betsy has been thinking about the nature of professorial authority within the context of politically diverse classrooms. Betsy, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:07] Betsy Barre: It’s so great to be back. As I shared with you before we got started, that Teaching in Higher Ed was the first podcast I ever did, multiple years ago. I can’t remember exactly how long ago, but we talked about student evaluations, and I loved it. I’m so glad to be back.

[00:02:18] Bonni: I’m so glad you’re back, too. The number of times that I have referenced the student evaluations, it’s almost like when you have that perfect collection of books on your bookshelf. I feel like we have a really good collection about course evaluations because we need to know the evidence behind it, the research, some of the bias built into it. I cried. I have not cried many times on the podcast, twice, I believe, to my knowledge.

I heard from so many people that, oh my gosh, to hear from someone who understands how painful that these can be sometimes. We also had one that looked a little bit more at, because of the bias, what are other ways that we might think about evaluating our teaching or peer evaluating other’s teaching? It was really good. I’m so glad that you were here, and I’m so glad that you’re back.

Today, we’re going to be looking at a whole bunch of topics, but a lot of them look at, to me, things, Betsy, that were amplified, the issues got amplified with the pandemic, but they were there all along. Talk a little bit about– We’re ultimately going to get– Spoiler alert, everybody. We’re going to be getting to the point of talking about a tool that you and your team developed to help us with these challenges, but before we even get there, could you talk about the challenges, before the pandemic hit, that made you realize that this kind of a tool was necessary? We’ll talk a little bit about how the pandemic changed that even more and then we’ll get to that.

[00:03:48] Betsy: Yes, sure. I would like to say that I actually wrote a blog post during the pandemic about workload that struck a chord and a lot of people were really interested in, and we’ll come back to that in a bit. I started that blog post by talking about my just general interest in time. I’m very interested in time management, and this is separate from my teaching and learning interests.

I’m very interested in time management because, particularly those of us who work in teaching centers, and when I transitioned from being a faculty member to working in a teaching center, I had many, many, many projects that I was working on, and I had trouble keeping track and keeping up with all the work. I just felt like I never got anything done. I felt like I was wasting time and I was curious where all my time was going.

I started actually time-tracking, I did it for one semester. I was just fascinated by it. At the same time as that was happening when I first moved into teaching centers, I also, as a humanist, was always very interested in this question that we got. Usually, in new faculty orientation, we would often get this question from new faculty, which is “How much reading should I assign? How much reading is appropriate?”

I used to ask that myself as a humanist because I was mostly assigning a lot of reading, and I never felt satisfied with the answer that I gave. It would usually say maybe one of three things. I would say, “It’s hard to know based on the type of reading.” That’s not really an answer. I would say, “Check with what your department’s doing, what’s the norm there.” Of course, departments may not be doing things that are appropriate, so I didn’t feel very confident about that.

I felt like I didn’t have a good answer to that. I was also very interested in the impact of time and how we are not good estimators of time. I got really frustrated with my answer, for multiple reasons. I thought, “Gosh, there has to be research out there somewhere about how much students can read.” That’s what I was explicitly thinking about reading when I began, how much time does it– and not just students, how much time does it take us to read a certain number of pages?

There’s a lot of literature on speed reading and other things out there. In fact, most of the psychologists will say that actually, all that stuff about speed reading is not well-founded, that you can’t actually speed-read. I actually started diving in. It was one summer. I had a little bit more time to read. I started diving into the research on reading, partly for myself to be selfish with how much time because I actually found, in my own time-tracking, that I spent a lot of time reading.

That took more time than I felt like it was taking. I was very interested in this, and they actually have some estimates in the reading literature about what the maximums are. Of course, there’s a range. I started doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, and I was like, “Oh, what does that mean? What can I give an answer to our faculty who has this question?”

I was doing the back-of-the-envelope, and I was thinking, “Oh, won’t it be cool if we had some tool to just automatically calculate this for you?” It was still, again, just thinking about reading. I’m not a coder, I’m not a computer person, but I got online and was like, “I bet you there’s a way I could make it in Excel and then put it on the web.” It’s not a very elegant way of doing it. I was trying to learn.

There was something like JavaScript online that you could do to make it work. It was just crazy. My husband, who is a quantitative social scientist, who also does programming in R, et cetera, walked in the room and was like, “Whoa, stop doing that. There’s an easier way. I can show you some software or a studio that could make it in shiny.” He’s like, “That’s a cool project. We just worked together that summer and started talking to other faculty about, “Well, what were the things you would want to know?”

We started talking about papers and how many pages, and how would we design it? We got some feedback on design and then by the end of the summer, we just put it out there in the world, just open-source, whatever, you can use it, and tons of people responded. Now many people are using it in their research and has been clearly a need that people are very curious about this question.

For me, it was like I just wanted to be able to answer the question, but it turns out it’s been fascinating, and we can talk more about whatever you’re interested in, Bonni, how people have used the Workload Estimator, even though it just started as a way to give guideposts for those of us who were thinking about, “How many pages do I assign in my syllabus? What’s a reasonable amount?”

[00:07:46] Bonni: I’m chuckling so hard right now. In our family, our children who are now seven and nine, a frequent thing that happens at dinnertime conversations is this, “Wait, what? Wait, wait, what? Wait, what?” I’m laughing so hard because my brain is about to explode right now because I’m thinking, “Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, could we go back?” Even though this is not about the Workload Estimator, I feel like sometimes on this podcast, lately, I keep becoming a victim of realizing, “Oh, you bought into that little myth hook, line, and sinker,” sometimes just when you think you’ve escaped that as a human being like, “Now I won’t fall for baits anymore.”

Growing up, a family member who I won’t say who it was because I don’t want to embarrass the person, but was really into learning how to speed-read, the person does read really, really fast, I mean unbelievably fast. Could you, before we come back to the Workload Estimator, which is the whole reason you’re here?

[00:08:39] Betsy: Yes, basically, of course, we can read at any speed. I can share, in the resources for this podcast, some of the essential summary articles about this, too, about-

[00:08:50] Bonni: Oh, I’d love that.

[00:08:51] Betsy: -reading, in particular. We can, of course, read as quickly. There are all sorts of ways to read quickly. What they have found is that after a certain point, that as your speed goes up, your comprehension goes down almost perfectly. The faster you go, the less comprehension you have because … you can learn it just as well, read it just as closely that quickly.

What they say is that’s not possible, but you cannot read it as closely when you are speed-reading. I guess I don’t know if that challenges the view that your family member had but essentially that you’re going to lose comprehension the faster you go after a certain point.

[00:09:29] Bonni: Because for anyone who’s not seen the Workload Estimator, which, of course, I feel like everyone has, but I know not everyone has, but there are two elements. There is the number of words, but also My Familiarity. What will the reader’s likely familiarity with it be? Of course, the less familiar we are with something, then the slower we’re going to read. It’s not just the one variable of me as a person. How quick do I read?

Again, you’re having to group the whole class, you’re having to estimate the whole class.

[00:10:02] Betsy: Yes. That’s a challenge, too, that I can come back to, but there are actually three elements. One is how many words, so that’s just pretty straightforward, duh. Of course, if you give them a lot of words, it’s going to take longer to read, but then there’s what the central finding of the research is that reading rate is variable, again, duh, but it’s based primarily on your familiarity with the words, as you just said.

That’s really important because it means that students who are “really strong readers,” you can even have a PhD in physics, if you give them a philosophy article or vice versa, they, all of a sudden, become a much not as strong of a reader. I think that’s really important for us to emphasize that when a student is new to a subject, they’re going to be slower, regardless of their innate skills, intelligence, ability, whatever if that even exists.

When they are not familiar with the vocabulary of a discipline, they’re going to go a lot slower. I just think that’s just really important, even if you’re a senior, really important to grad students, really important to understand. The third element, apart from how familiar are you with the words, is what is the purpose of the reading? This gets back to the speed-reading question.

If the purpose of the reading is “I just want my students to be generally familiar,” this is what a lot of historians are like, “I want you to have the ark of the historical narrative.” Historians give multiple books, sometimes in a week, just huge amounts of reading. If that’s the goal, then there’s a different speed with which our students can probably read because we’re not expecting them to really have detailed understandings of the argument.

Philosophers, on the other hand, are the opposite spectrum, I would say, is that they often give two-page assignments of reading because they want you to read every sentence multiple times because it’s really important to understand the way each sentence connects to one another. That’s the third dimension is, what are your purposes for the reading? Is it to skim? Is it just basically understand, or is it to engage because I also want my students to be writing in the margins, to be debating the text?

Of course, that takes a whole lot more time because that’s not just reading, it’s actually engaging with the text. Our reading portion of the Workload Estimator was the most complex and also the most research-based. The other stuff is much more fuzzy and how far it’s actually– It’s just really more of an estimate than the reading. The reading is still an estimate, too, but it’s also more research-based and more complex.

Speed reading, yes, of course, you can read quickly, but the argument is that you’re not going to understand as much as you think you do. One of the other interesting research about how college students read, which is related to this question, is that the difference between an expert reader and a college or a student reader often is that an expert reader will slow down when they don’t know a word.

Students often will just literally read at the same rate because they’re just trying to check a box, “I have to do this reading,” so they just read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, even if they don’t understand what they’re reading, they just keep going. One of the ways to teach reading is to say it’s really important that you actually slow down when you don’t know a word or that you slop and you think and then when you clearly understand what’s happening in the passage, you speed up there.

If you see that this is a description that you are more evidence for a claim you’ve already accepted, you can move through that because you’re like, “I don’t need more evidence, I already accept that claim. Let’s move forward.” Teaching students how to do this, often we as academics, don’t realize we’re doing it, we don’t know our skill. It’s just the expert blind spot. We don’t realize the differences between how we read and how students read.

This is where all that research on think-alouds for read-alouds where you would ask students or expert readers to actually verbally talk about what they’re thinking as they’re reading. If you compare our faculty members to students, it’s a dramatic difference. I think it’s a cool activity. I’ve never done it in my classes, but it would be a really cool activity to highlight the way that when I read, what I do when I read, versus what they do. That’s partly the engagement and other things, too, but it is true that students tend to not speed up and slow down, whereas the rest of us tend to vary our reading rate as we go.

[00:13:55] Bonni: Oh, this is just fascinating. I’m so glad I asked because I didn’t want to be taking us on a rabbit trail, but it sounds like this is actually really important for people to understand. I think it’s so easy for us to get angry to start ascribing things to students that is not really reasonable to ascribe in terms of they’re lazy, they don’t want to work hard. When I was there, I worked hard, and they don’t want to do that.

I don’t want to say we’re bad people for doing that. I want us to recognize if you read your discipline that way, it’s unreasonable to expect that someone else would. One of the things about the calculator that, for me, has been so important, that’s that I use it every time I go and build my syllabus, even though I’ve used it for the same class. Now I’ve probably done it at least– I don’t know, some of them I’ve looked at it maybe more than five times on the same class. Why would you keep doing it?

Every time it teaches me something. I want to test something out on you. I know that we have to be very careful anytime, as researchers, to be ascribing cause and effect on things. I know this is not cause and effect, but it feels like cause and effect. It feels like the less I assign a reading, the more likely it is that they’ll actually do the reading. It’s not that it’s not like if you do this, it’s a magic sauce and all of a sudden 100% of people are going to read because there’s other things that couple with it, to actually like you said, “What’s the purpose of the reading?”

If they know, in advance, the purpose of the reading, then they’re going to be that much, so I’m layering multiple strategies on top. I can’t say that, but yes, I think this is so important.

[00:15:36] Betsy: I think, yes. I think the question of, and I think in the literature, I don’t know if I like this phrase, but they’re referred to as reading compliance, the question of compliance. “Are students actually reading?” is a central question that all of us have. There are a variety of hypotheses for why they might not be reading or why they– I think one of them is they are reading, but they’re just not reading well.

That’s the point about teaching them how to read because they may be literally going through, on the page, each of the words. If they say, “I did read,” we’re like, “How did you read? You don’t know the main arguments, you don’t know.” Part of it is actually teaching them how to read, how much time it takes. I think that’s really important, but then it’s also possible that we’re giving them so much that they just give up if they think there’s no chance that they’re actually going to be able to get it done.

Also, importantly, another huge pedagogical challenge that needs attention is that if we’re just going to read it to them when they come to class, if we’re just going to go over it, exactly what’s in the text in class, why would they read? I wouldn’t read, that’s inefficient. If I know that it’s going to either I won’t come to class and I’ll do the reading or I’ll come to class and I won’t do the reading.

It’s also really important that we don’t encourage them or create incentives or whatever to suggest that “Oh, you don’t need to read it because I’m going to teach it to you.” There’s a challenge there, though, because sometimes students will read it and be confused so then you do need to teach to help them understand the text. There’s a real interesting balance of, okay, how do I not create the conditions where they’re like, “Well, why would I read? I know I’m going to get ‘taught it’ in class” versus making sure that if they were confused by something, you actually help them understand it?

I do think there are many interesting hypotheses about why students don’t read or whether they’re reading well, and I think the Workload Estimator can help on multiple fronts with that. One, it can help us give them– I, actually, am very explicit with my students about how I use the estimator and how much I expect. I say, “Look, I’m going to do this for you, I’m going to make sure, as your instructor, that I’m not giving you more work than is reasonable, but then you have to give me–

“You actually have to do the work. This is a deal we’re making. If I’m doing this for you, to be reasonable, then I would like you to also make sure that you do this work.” We talk about it. Then I say to them, “If it’s taking you longer than I expect, I really want to learn that,” for a variety of reasons, to improve my estimates because it’s based on my assumptions about their vocabulary or their experience with the literature.

It also helps if people are struggling in particular ways, or how can I advise individual students on that front? I do think the Workload Estimator can certainly improve the extent to which students come to class, having done their reading and having done it well.

[00:18:26] Bonni: I know we haven’t covered the entire tool yet, but I can’t wait to get to this next part, which is, the tool gets used for a while. You talked about the origins of it, yay to your husband for helping you.

[00:18:37] Betsy: Right. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Justin.

[00:18:38] Bonni: I didn’t have the R part of the story, which I love that that little tidbit was in there, too. You don’t want to do this in Excel. Could you talk some about the ways in which the pandemic then had new challenges? I’m saying that they’re new. They weren’t new, they just got newly recognized by people.

[00:19:00] Betsy: Right. In fact, I don’t know how much people know about Rice. I was at Rice before when I made the estimator, and they hadn’t really moved into online teaching and learning very much. Just like pinky toes and mostly in MOOCs, not really for our students, and maybe some very little online teaching and learning that happened. When I was making it, I wasn’t and I had never taught online before.

I had been at liberal arts colleges before, but those institutions had never taught online. One of the things that happened with it while I was still at Rice, which is really interesting, is that we found that many of the people who were really using it were people who were basically instructional designers or folks who were tasked with helping with accreditation standards for online learning.

Because there’s been a long-standing question, apparently, and this I’ve learned over the past few years, a long-standing question of, how do we figure out what the equivalent seat time, contact hours, things like that are to make sure that our online courses are comparable to face-to-face but also to make sure that they meet certain accreditation standards that they’re providing enough work if it’s fully asynchronous, in other words well, enough and not too much, both directions?

Apparently, there were challenges that some faculty were assigning way too much work in online spaces, some are doing less and as you know, which is a whole other podcast, there, it’s really interesting in higher ed that online teaching and learning has a lot more oversight and a lot more top-down structure of how you design your courses than a lot of face-to-face learning does.

There was a whole group of people who were in charge of making sure that these courses, not the faculty, but other people– That was interesting, too. It was people outside of the faculty who wanted to use the tool to help the faculty or maybe force the faculty. That was an interesting challenge for me as a faculty member. I was like, “I don’t know that you should be using this tool to create policy,” and some schools were doing that, they were creating policy that you had to fit within the tool.

It was interesting some faculty were like, “Is this really validated?” I’m like, “Dude, it’s just an estimator. It’s not meant to be a scientific tool, right?” I had to defend, in some ways, the faculty on that front. What was interesting to me was that it was very clear that there were really interesting questions about online activities and assignments, and it wasn’t clear that our estimator really spoke to some of those things because it’s different, like, okay, how much we didn’t have the time it took to be in class in our estimator because it was out-of-class workload.

That’s the way it was designed, out-of-class workload. Of course, with online and asynchronous work, everything’s out-of-class, so it wasn’t perfectly captured for online or out-of-class versus in-class, also engaged, or contact hours versus non-contact hours, we didn’t add anything about discussion boards or reading discussion boards. We had long thought about– because we’ve gotten tons of feedback on the estimator and there are lots of ideas to improve it, but of course, but Justin and I are super-busy, and it’s a free tool.

We’re like, “Well when we get to it,” and then I transitioned to Wake Forest and just lots of moves, and we didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but when the pandemic happened, it became very clear at least at Wake Forest because, also, Wake Forest hasn’t had a lot of experience with online, that we should really go ahead and just try to update it for basic updates for online activities, teaching, and learning.

We worked with Allen Brown, who is our wonderful director of online education at Wake Forest, to help us think about what would be the sections we would put in there that would help us and revise it slightly to what would output to help us think about online teaching and learning. While it was true the pandemic put the fire under us to get it done, it really is just more about making it more accessible to different kinds of courses and different kinds of delivery patterns.

[00:22:35] Bonni: The one big piece that comes to mind is, first of all, all of the people you’ve mentioned, all the people that have used either the first version or the second version of the estimator and then, at the same time, a lot happening in terms of students perceiving that “Wow, I just got assigned a lot of busywork.” Actually, I guess I don’t even want to say that that was necessarily new, I certainly would hear feedback from students in terms of course evaluation, I don’t mean from my classes, by the way, I am perfect.

No, but I’m in faculty development. If faculty need coaching, that’s a challenge sometimes for faculty to address, and I think that there got to be, at least with the faculty that I work with, some confusion, thinking that when you’re better about making things transparent, making things more evident, like instead of just saying, “Read the first three chapters,” when you’re actually using these strategies that might promote and reward better reading, then if they tried to maybe dip their toes into them, then I think they probably felt that was very punitive.

“All I get is just busywork, busywork, busywork.” Part of that, to me, I didn’t know that you have this interest in time, so I can’t wait till the next time, we get to have a conversation because I have a whole new area of things I want to talk to you about. As somebody who thinks a lot about time, too, I always, in the learning management system, would try to break things out such that you could look at a calendar and be able to balance your own workload as a student and go “Okay, I have these things from my other classes in this and that.”

I know that if I break it up too much, it terrifies people because, in my own time management, I try to break it down to the smallest thing of “How long do I think this particular thing will take me to do?”

[00:24:27] Betsy: Yes, it’s like with budgeting, I joke about, you can either be the type of person who does three categories for the budget or like, “I want to have a category for like packs of gum or something like, “How much detail do you want to track?” I’m definitely the detail person, right? My husband’s like, “Oh, God, okay, whatever.” I actually do think this is a really important point, that what I think, there’s a lot of things talked about with how students experienced workload, students who had never been online and then who started taking courses online and the way faculty shifted, as well.

I do think, in general, that when students say that the work has increased or work has increased generally when they feel and it’s not just students, probably all of us, frankly, that when people think about work, and I’m sure there’s research on it, I just don’t know it, it’s less about “How many hours am I spending than it is?” than it is “How many things am I doing?”

“Oh, I used to only have to do 3 things, now I have to do 50 things, and even if those 50 things are meant to stay take the same amount of time as those 3 things, it feels like it’s way more work than then it was.” There’s some truth to that, which is that you do have to spend some extra time to keep track of all 50 things. That’s one of the things I say in my blog post about hypotheses about why students are thinking workload was more this year, is that it is true, there’s extra cognitive load when you have to think, “Okay, I now have 20 assignments that are due rather than just an exam and a final exam and a midterm.”

We know that the best practice is that this is good for teaching and learning to have small assignments, low stakes, we were doing that, faculty were doing that to help students, but students felt that it was more. That’s one possibility is that faculty didn’t increase their workload, but students just felt like it was more because there were more things to keep track of, and they were thinking about their work in terms of the number of things rather in terms of the total hours they were spending.

[00:26:25] Bonni: Yes, and I’m excited to link to that blog post. I read it multiple times, and there’s so much there. It was all the things that were in my head in a mushy way.

[00:26:35] Betsy: I definitely think the reason that resonated with people is just really interesting, it was fascinating to me. It’s always fascinated me which blog posts take off, I’m sure you feel this way, too, about podcasts or whatever, but it was very clear that everyone was concerned about this issue. I even had high school. It started circulating K-12.

It’s principals and other people messaging me.

Clearly, people were very concerned about this issue, but I also think we all had some of those hypotheses in mind, and it was just laying out what I’ve heard … They’re all probably partially true but just saying there’s a bunch of things that are probably going on, not just one thing, and I think people appreciated. They saw their preferred one in there somewhere. That also helped like, “This is the thing that I think is really going on” but to see, also, yes, there’s other things, too, that could be happening.

[00:27:18] Bonni: I think so much of it, in my own teaching and also with faculty I have the privilege to work alongside. Anytime we are ascribing negative attributes to students, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble. I tried to think, and I was talking with a faculty the other day, who’s just disappointed. She put much passion and work into her classes and then she discovered that her students told her that they’ll never watch videos unless they “have to.”

I was like, “Yes,” I was trying to help her see that this is not a reflection of them and their value that they see in her as an educator and all this and trying to help her. For me, I think that like you, I’m on the side of more wanting to break things out. That’s because of time management. If you do that, you’ll often think about time as a finite resource, and therefore, how do I get the most out of it, et cetera. “How do I spend my time?” is one way to do all that.

It isn’t going to help if they look at their calendar, and it’s just overwhelming. I’m not going to go all the way in the direction that I would go if it was me, but I’m not going to go all the way in the direction the other way, either. It is still probably going to look overwhelming. One of the things I’ll do is I’ll actually share my screen and show them, “These are the things from our class. Let’s look at it together. Let’s look at this coming week.”

Boy if I saw that “Gosh, there’s four things on Thursday but actually, I wanted to tell you what those are,” one of them I’ll have them do some retrieval practice on their own, and they record it using a screencasting tool. I’ll say, “See this right here. Look how quick this is going to go. In fact, the first time we’re doing it, I’m actually going to have you all do it right now. Just put yourself on mute and go do this and it shouldn’t take you more than 5 or 10 minutes because we can do retrieval practice really quick.”

Sometimes we’ll actually do the little itty-bitty assignment in class so that if they have questions, they can ask them, and then they can … any anxiety, “Whoa, … down like that looks like a lot because there were four things on Thursday. We just did one. Now there’s only three things on Thursday,” to help them differentiate.

Of course, if you align your points, which is something that my colleague, David Rhodes, has really taught me is if you align our your points with an estimation of how much time it will take to teach the students about that “See that one right there’s only 50 points, that’s only going to be anticipated it might take you 30 minutes to do it versus that one,” and then they can see, “Oh, these are just stakes, 400 points, high-stakes assignment. They’re also an estimate of time.”

By the way, this doesn’t work perfectly in every type of class, but in general, they could look at it and have some sense of that, that fear could be reduced. Like you said earlier if I think I could never do it, “Boy, it’s a busy week, I’ll never finish four assignments for Thursday,” instead, “Maybe I could finish four assignments, maybe they’re not that big” instead of just giving up entirely and deciding, “Okay, I’m out this week because I just can’t possibly do this all.”

[00:30:23] Betsy: Yes, and I do think one thing, to come back, to circle back to this question of efficiency and how we use the Workload Estimator is that one of the things I found, the way that I used the estimator was sometimes there would be an assignment or a reading and it would take a ton of time. Then I would look at it and I would think, “Okay, what is my learning outcome for that reading assignment?”

I would think, “Is there another text that I can give them that achieves the same outcome but that’s easier to read or an assignment?” You do it with reading, but still, what I often do with the Workload Estimator is I realized, “Oh, I really wanted to give them this more academic text.” Then realized, “If I don’t really care for that particular case that it’s an academic text, maybe I can find a popular text that they can read that covers the same ground,” the same thing with assignments.

One of the things, an example I often give is if you’re having them do presentations, think about, what is your learning outcome for the presentation? If it’s just learning how to give a presentation, does it really need to be a 15-minute presentation, or can it be literally a 30-second presentation where they stand and it’s really about the physical aspect of it and eye contact and things like that?

The Workload Estimator can help you think through, “Is this activity that normally takes millions of hours really worth it, given my outcomes for the course?” which is related to what you’re saying about balancing the points with how important that assignment is to the course, right? It just helps you think through to make sure that those things are aligned, which I think can be really helpful, too, for students to see, “Oh, if somebody takes a lot of time, it’s really important for the course, both in terms of grades but also in terms of learning because she really wants me to learn this.”

[00:32:06] Bonni: It’s so hard because I think we just have a tendency to think– all of us. We have a tendency to think it’s all-important. When people start to learn about universal design for learning, then they go, “Well, I couldn’t possibly not have it be a paper and have them do a video instead because writing is just so essential for all of us for all of our lives in every case.”

It can’t be the case because college is not only 100% about writing, there are other skills that get developed. By the way, side note, you could become a better writer even through an avenue of communicating something via video. These things overlap more than I think we sometimes realize. That’s such a good, healthy thing for us to do constantly. “Why am I assigning this? What is the expected outcome? Then, how could I measure? What does done look like in this particular thing?” It’s just such a healthy exercise, both in terms of calculating workload but also just in terms of having meaningful education that actually matters.

[00:33:09] Betsy: Yes. I think one thing, you were talking about how you introduce your students to the assignments and help prepare them and manage, frame expectations, that’s super-important on this front. One of the things I was really interested about this past year was whether there were differences between the way first-year students were thinking about workload and seniors, and I don’t actually have good evidence on this.

We collected some data, but I don’t have a good sense from our data that we collected about this, but it is interesting to me to think about once students get comfortable with college, what they’re used to, what’s the status quo in terms of how much work is usually required, which that’s important. How much work do they actually have to do, to do well in the course?

If things change on them, that’s going to be, obviously, upsetting because they’ve set expectations. First-year students come in often thinking, “Oh, college is really hard. What is going to be expected of me?” I think they’re interesting questions of whether– at least anecdotally we heard a lot more from our juniors and seniors who were upset about workload than we did from our first-year students.

I don’t know for sure about the data on that, but it just is an interesting hypothesis because one thing and I think we should talk about maybe further is this hypothesis that has been around before the pandemic. I think we’ve confirmed it here, too, which is that students, on average, expect to spend about two hours per week per credit hour in a traditional semester. Faculty expect, on average, about three, so that’s 50% more.

That was in the literature before, and I think part of what is interesting about what happened is never before, on a massive scale, have we taught faculty about best practices for teaching and learning than we did this year. Part of what we were teaching them was you can’t just expect students to do the work, you actually have to hold them accountable for doing it. I guess you have to turn it in, or you have to have them ask questions about it.

I actually think this is very much a thing, a plausible explanation, which is that what happened this year was that for the first time enmass, faculty were actually holding students accountable for the three hours a week rather than two. That is a 50% increase, which is a huge increase. Students are right to say that’s a huge increase if they could get by and do well and maybe even get As by doing only two hours a week, including class time.

That would be including class time, but then they’re now suddenly expected they have to do three in order to get to do as well as they had done in the past. That’s a big change. I think that’s part of– and I’ll be fascinated to know what happens going forward. Do faculty keep holding students accountable now that they’ve learned this? Are students still going to feel like the workload is overwhelming? I just don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:35:53] Bonni: I’m laughing so hard at myself because two hours versus three doesn’t sound big-

[00:36:00] Betsy: It does.

[00:36:00] Bonni: -until you say 50%. I go, “That’s really big.” [laughs]

[00:36:03] Betsy: … because it’s either 30 hours a week or 45 hours a week, that’s an additional 15 hours a week, right?

[00:36:11] Bonni: Yes, absolutely.

[00:36:12] Betsy: 15 hours a week. They could do so many things with 15 hours a week, whether they’re working, whether they’re with family, whether they’re partying, there’s a lot of things they can do with 15 hours a week. If you went from 30 to 45, in the middle of a pandemic, that’s why they were mad because they’re like, “It’s a pandemic. All of a sudden, we now have this extra work?”

We actually surveyed our students in the spring and asked them about how much time they were spending and then faculty, how much they expected, and it’s the exact same thing you would see pre-pandemic. We asked them also what they expected. Students expected or ended up spending about two hours per credit hour; faculty expected three, it’s exactly that thing.

I do think it was partially, pandemic is stressful, everything’s harder that’s also part of it. There were more little things also part of it, but this issue of suddenly, now you’re being expected to spend that extra time is worth all of us thinking about, what is the standard that we expect the students? Do we expect them– Actually, we found some interesting variation among our faculty on that front, we never talk about that.

I think now in a new faculty orientation, I want to talk about this like, “What are the expectations for how many hours students should spend out of class in your class?” There’s been that Carnegie unit or a standard, rule of thumb, two hours out of class for every hour in class, but I assume most faculty knew that. Actually, I’ve heard from our faculty now, as we talk about it more, that some are like some had a view that you should have more hours for upper-level classes than for lower-level, which was interesting to me because, “Oh, seniors are supposed to spend a lot more time on their classes than freshmen.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but that was their approach, which was interesting. There’d never been explicit conversations about it in the departments. Why do we expect faculty to know what is the standard? I do think it is– Again, we try to in the United States, probably not just the United States, we just try to pretend that time doesn’t exist, and we can have infinite amounts of it, but we all need to be talking more about time.

Whether it’s our labor or other things, it’s a finite amount of time, and we cannot be expecting students who are working 40 hours a week to be putting in this amount of time and still finish in four years, something has to give. I think there’s policy issues associated with this, too, just really interesting. It sounds like a silly kind of minor thing thinking about time, but it actually has huge equity implications moving forward, too.

[00:38:32] Bonni: Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I have three of them. One is I’d like you to go check out the two versions of the course estimator tool that we’ve been talking about. If you’ve never heard of it before, never used it before, I think I don’t know what you think, Betsy, probably a good starting point would be the first one, just especially if you’re particularly interested in the reading how long does it take?

[00:38:56] Betsy: There’s a blog post that goes along with it, actually, that introduces it that I wrote when I introduced it, so that might be helpful too to get a sense of how it works.

[00:39:04] Bonni: Yes. I’ll link to all of this in the show notes. I recommend that you look at the first one. I recommend you look at the second one, and maybe you didn’t even know it existed. Go check out the second one as well and see if it might suit your needs, and it has more things than it, as Betsy said, around other types of assignments a little bit beyond reading that will help you estimate that workload.

Then the third thing does have to do with time. I’m loving that I have a theme going here. A lot of times when people talk to me about productivity, they think that there’s just a missing– If only they knew about a particular application, what’s the best application and then you get into like, “Well, do you use a Mac, or do you use a PC?” and all that. I’d like to introduce a general category of applications that people may not realize exist out there and then I’ll tell you the one that I’m using, but it’s less interesting than just that you know this kind of tool exists.

Here’s the challenge when I am talking to someone like Betsy, and she shares all of these things that are making my mind explode and then I go to put the show notes together. In the past, it would be a pretty high-friction thing, first of all, because I get so excited and want to read every single word of every single thing that she just referred to. You could imagine that I have to stop myself from doing that.

We’ve talked about, before, digital bookmarks so that I can cue them up for future reference and all of that. Even if I disciplined myself and didn’t read every word of every resource that she recommends today, I still would have a lot of laborious effort to, “Okay, I got to go type in the name of the thing. What is it that she just recommended?” and then go copy the link, and then paste it over, and then do the next one and the next one.

The more great tools that someone like Betsy recommends, the longer it’s going to take me to take all of those links and those things and pass them on to others, in this case, in the form of show notes, but it could be out to our faculty. I send a monthly update to them, as well. There’s a really great category of tools that you can just have a bunch of tabs open on your website.

I’ll have all of these links when I’m done researching and finding all the things that Betsy talked about. Then I just click on a button, up on my toolbar, in this particular case, the tool is called Tab Space, but there are a lot of these kinds of link collectors. When I do it, it brings up a set of options. Do I want to save these gazillion links all at once and close all of those tabs, which is what I want to do most of the time?

I don’t, there’s no need to keep them open once they’re captured in a space. Then it’s almost like having an ever-expanding list of links. Since I started doing this two or three months ago, I’ve got all the past episodes. It’ll say TIHE and then the number of it and then they’ll say Betsy Barry. Then if I want to go back and open them all up again, I can do that all with one, they’re all saved there in this lovely, lovely tool.

Once I have saved them, I can go and name the thing. I just had a great conversation yesterday about social annotation with someone at Hypothesis. We’ve talked a lot about Hypothesis before, and speaking of that conversation, I’m going to be able to go back, and I can just click. I can share all of these links, and the links will be there along with the text. I could do it as HTML, I can do it just as text.

I can do it as a language called markdown, which is what a lot of us use for plain text writing, all kinds of ways to share the information and keep it growing and be able to reference to it. It’s a nice combination with a bookmarking tool, a great way to save time. Those are my recommendations for today. Betsy, I’m going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:42:42] Betsy: Yes. Actually, I came prepared with three, but I now have a new one, now that you just raised a category as we were talking that time. If any of you are curious, some people asked me, after my blog post, about what software I used to time-track, and I used a free software, free for certain levels, called Toggl. It’s T-O-G-G-L. Since I used it, it’s been bought out by somebody else or merged or something.

Maybe it’s called something else like Toggle or something else, but it’s pretty cool, pretty easy to do. If you don’t want to use that tool, use another tool. I basically did it for a semester because, of course, it takes time to time-track. I don’t do it now all the time, but it was a really useful thing for me to do, just to get a snapshot for a semester, as I was thinking about my future work-life balance.

In terms of the things I came prepared to talk about, disconnected intentionally, in some ways, disconnected from our conversation we’ve been having, it’s somewhat related to my teaching. When I get to teach when I’m not leading the teaching center, I finally get a chance to teach, my background is in ethics. I’m trained as an ethicist, and I teach my favorite course and my most meaningful course I teach is a course on sexual ethics or the ethics of intimacy.

I haven’t done it in a while, but I’m going to be doing it in the spring. I’ve been thinking a lot about those issues and reading various things. I have some recommendations but I think anyone who’s in higher ed because I designed that course to specifically think about not just sexual ethics broadly but the sexual ethics of sex on campus and how our students navigate sexuality relationships and intimacy on campus.

I have some recommendations there. One serious, one fun, one something in between. The serious book but it’s just so wonderful, Sarah Cavanaugh actually, introduced me to this book. One of the best books I’ve read in years is called Sexual Citizens: Sex Power and Assault on Campus, by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan, who are a sociologist and a public health expert in Columbia.

They do this multi-year ethnography, social scientific study of students at Columbia. It is about assault. There’s conversations about assault, but it’s not just about assault. It’s actually the way they frame this as it’s a book about the way in which students design their sexual projects and the way in which their communities shaped their sexual projects. It’s just a fabulously nuanced, wonderful book that I’m going to use in my class for my students, as they’re thinking about their relationships moving forward.

Now, the fun one, if you haven’t seen this on Netflix, I highly recommend the TV show Sex Education. If you haven’t had a chance to watch that, so wonderful, so lovingly done, it could be a really useful thing if you have teenagers to show as well but just to think about the nuances of sexuality that we don’t often talk about and why we should talk about it. The main character, his mom is a sex therapist, which has a funny part of it.

He’s embarrassed that his mom is a sex therapist. Then in between, it just came out yesterday. This is what got me thinking about these recommendations, or at least I just read it yesterday, is there a new essay in Harper’s Magazine. It’s an excerpt from another journal by the philosopher Agnes Callard called Breaking Points, and it’s about the ethics of breaking up.

She basically argues that we don’t often talk about breaking up as a moral issue. Here, either you should do it or you shouldn’t do it. There’s no theorizing about that’s an unethical breakup. She talks about ghosting. Should you just break it off with people? Is that ethical, it talks about divorce, super-interesting, really funny as well, the way she writes. I highly recommend this, and I’m probably going to start my course with this article, but I think it’s good for my students. Any of you will love it because it’s a pretty funny, really thoughtful piece about how we think about our relationships with the ethics of relationships.

[00:46:17] Bonni: Oh my gosh. I just love this. I had mentioned that in my conversation yesterday about Hypothesis, I get to have some fun experimenting with how to potentially integrate it in with this other reading service that I’m using. I needed something fun to play with and annotate. You just gave me that, that’s so great. That’s going to help me. I’m about to take some time off coming up. I’m just super-excited about getting to play a little bit with that as well. Oh my gosh. These are such great recommendations. I always love whenever we go way off of whatever …

[00:46:48] Betsy: … still connected to students in higher ed. I think your audience will be interested in it, too.

[00:46:54] Bonni: Oh, for sure. How could they not be? Well, thank you so much for coming back. I am now so excited that we have our next topic for the next time you come back … I’m so excited about being able to explore time with you more broadly and in the next opportunity. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today.

[00:47:11] Betsy: Yes, I appreciate it. We love your podcast, Bonni.

[00:47:14] Bonni: Oh, thank you.

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[00:47:19] Betsy: I’ve got Hannah Stachowiak here to help me with words of thanks.

[00:47:24] Hannah Stachowiak: Thank you, Betsy Barry, for being a guest on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:47:29] Bonni: We’re so grateful that you were able to join in today’s conversation. For those of you who are listening but who have yet to subscribe to the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update, I think you should subscribe and so does someone else.

[00:47:47] Hannah Stachowiak: Subscribe to Bonni Stachowiak’s channel, also known as Mommy’s channel.

[00:47:53] Bonni: Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and thank you so much for listening.

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[00:48:20] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.  

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.