At the beginning of the semester I proposed a project to promote OER at BSU (which was not approved). In the process I was asked how much time I thought it would take and not having any data I grabbed a number from thin air. This prompted me to keep track of my time this semester, to see exactly how long I spent on each of the things I do at work. In addition to wondering how much time I spend working on OER I was curious about the more traditional triad of teaching, research/writing, and service. BSU is a teaching-oriented university, so I suspected the majority of my time would be spent working on my courses, but I wanted to find out for sure.
I used an application called Tyme 2 which I installed on my desktop and notebook computers, iPad and phone. It allowed me to create twenty tasks in three categories: courses, OER, and Professional Development (PD) which included both service tasks like advising and attending committee meetings, and also my work preparing the edits of my book for publication. I tracked each of these tasks over seventeen weeks from the last week of August to the end of the third week of December. While there may have been some slight overlap between OER activities and course activities, I think the results are pretty accurate.
So what were the results? Turns out I spent two thirds of my time working on my courses, for a total of 29 hours per week. I didn’t count one week (Thanksgiving) when I was at an OER conference and only did an hour of course-related work. If that week counted, my weekly coursework average was about 27.3 hours. Similarly, if I don’t count the conference week when I devoted about 85 hours to OER, my average time spent working on OER was about 8 hours weekly. My weekly PD total was 7.3 hours, made up mostly of work proofreading the first print of my manuscript and writing an index. My average workweek, not counting the conference week, was 44.2 hours.
The total time I devoted to courses over the semester was 485 hours (including some prep for courses I’ll offer in the spring). The largest block of time went to a new course, History of High Technology (HST 2600, 142 hours). The smallest block went to East Asia History (HST 3419, 81.5 hours), which was another new course but was online. The difference between the courses can be mostly accounted for by the 40 hours of meetings of the in-person class and the time it took me to produce PowerPoint lectures for that class. I made short videos for the online class which were much less time-consuming. Even so, the online course prep seemed to be slightly more efficient. Compared to the two in-person courses I’ve taught before (HST 1305, 103 hours and HST 2925, 102 hours), the online course still seems more efficient. Student evaluations of all these courses were similarly positive, and I felt about the same about my effectiveness in each of the new courses (a good start but there were some things I could improve); so although the sample set is low I think there may be some significance to these results. I’ll be more aware of this efficiency question in the future.
Looking forward, I plan to continue trying to streamline my courses using technology (more effective LMS tools, Hypothesis, online assessment, etc.) and to explore the effectiveness of online vs. in-person delivery. I had 30 students in my online East Asia course and 12 in my in-person High Tech, so at a very raw, numerical level the lesser time I spent on HST 3419 was more effective. Early in the semester our CPD ran a brief session about efficiency in course design at the Deans’ request. It was mostly oriented around surviving higher course caps and just scratched the surface. As we work to reverse decreasing enrollment at BSU and struggle with increasing class sizes, I think effectively and efficiently delivering online courses is going to be key.
MakingHistory.blog 