From Pablo Beneitone and Maria Yarosh, CALOHEA Coordination Team
The CALOHEA project has contributed to install the culture of student workload measurement as an integral part of curriculum design.
Student workload includes:
A. hours of direct interaction in a face-to-face or virtual learning environment between teacher and students. This includes lectures, seminars, laboratory or workshop activities, clinical and field activities, internships, and any curriculum activity that requires a physical or virtual presence of the student with the lecturer, teaching assistant, internship supervisor or another person responsible for the learning process (often referred to as contact hours);
B. time spent by students (in addition to contact hours) to achieve the learning outcomes of a given study period/unit. This time includes all the activities the teacher requires students to complete in order to prepare for the lectures, seminars, etc. (learning periods that happen as part of the contact hours) – e.g. reviewing notes, compiling and selecting information, reviewing and studying learning materials, completing assignments, preparing projects or dissertations, carrying out individual and group practical work.
It is important to stress that preparing for and completing assessment tasks – intermediate, final, oral, written, group, individual, etc. – is seen as an integral part of the learning process; be this during the contact hours or beyond the contact hours. Therefore, the time students spend on assessment(-related) activities they must complete in order for the faculty member to verify that the students have achieved the intended learning outcomes also forms part of the student workload.
Articulation of student workload is directly linked to making curriculum design more transparent, compatible and comparable in different contexts. This means that curriculum design based on student workload facilitates recognition of entire programmes and periods of study at inter-institutional and international level.
To learn more about the CALOHEA project, consult https://calohea.org/
The CALOHEA Erasmus+ project is coordinated by the Tuning Academy of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the ASEAN University Network and is co-funded by the European Commission.
