Time to Teach

We've discussed how clarifying expectations, keeping up-to-date FAQs, and setting boundaries can help to define the working parameters of online courses. Organizational functions help you to have the time to devote to what you love: teaching! But, what exactly is "online teaching" comprised of? In a face-to-face class an instructor can state, "I teach 50 minutes, three times a week" because that is the time the instructor is in the classroom; however, that doesn't include the supportive tasks that are needed to conduct a course successfully.

Jean-Marc Côté's prediction of education in the year 2000 (from late 1800s and early 1900s).

Supportive tasks occur in online classrooms as well, but the boundaries aren't as clearly defined since you aren't physically entering a room to teach. In 2005, Cavanaugh compared two sections of the same course taught by the same instructor—one online and one in the classroom—to determine the time spent in each modality. This experienced instructor accounted as closely as possible for any variations so that the comparison would be valid. Looking at only the teaching (including office hours) comparison, the instructor spent 117 hours in the online course and 59 in the classroom course. The author stated that the increased time could be directly attributed to communicating with students, but believed that reducing communication would adversely impact student learning. The comparison did not include development time or grading. I found Cavanaugh's concluding statement as quoted here to be most enlightening.

“Although the time demands here were large, teaching online was significantly less burdensome then [sic.] these numbers suggest."Joseph Cavanaugh, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics, Wright State University

These findings can be daunting to faculty preparing to teach online. Notice, though, that this study is nearly a decade old. Results reported by Van de Vord and Pogue in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (2012) openly stated that "the research on teaching time does not provide a clear answer as to the accuracy of [the] perception [that online takes longer]." Van de Vord and Pogue's study indicated that instructors spent more time in face-to-face courses than in online courses, but they point out that there are a number of variables that change even with the same instructor and the same course from semester to semester. Comparing face-to-face with online is much like comparing apples to oranges. They are of the same family but very different.

So how is an online faculty—particularly an inexperienced one—supposed to judge time commitments? Consider these points:

  • New ventures take longer than routine ones; you will spend considerably longer teaching your first online course than you will the same course later.
  • Some groups of learners are more "needy" than others and require more instructor oversight (e.g., time).
  • The introduction of new technologies or new learning environments usually causes the time commitment to increase even for experienced online instructors.
  • It always takes longer to develop and to teach than one expects.

One of the tasks that will need to occur early in a web-based course is for you to help the learners understand their time commitments. We'll talk about that next.