Written by Maria Yarosh and Pablo Beneitone, CALOHEA Coordination Team
CALOHEA project has introduced academics, students, university authorities and policy makers in the ASEAN region to four complementary tools for measuring student workload:
(1) Desk estimation – a tool that invites academics to estimate the student learning time for their course(s) and provides an overview of the estimated student workload for a complete degree programme, each programme year and term, and each course/programme component
(2) End-of-Semester Questionnaire – a survey conducted at the end of a semester in order to compare students’ and academics’ estimations of the time that was necessary to achieve the learning outcomes of courses offered during that semester, as well as of the time dedicated to different types of learning activities used during the course
(3) Logbook/Diary – a instrument that zooms in on a period of several weeks and compares the planning related to student workload made by an academic – activity by activity – with the actual time reported by students as spent on these activities
(4) Focus Group Discussion – a data collection technique that allows to obtain qualitative information from students and/or academics in order to understand differences in students’ and academics’ estimations of student workload
34 CALOHEA Teams have applied the four tools within their institutions and prepared reports about advantages and most effective ways to apply each of the tools in particular national, institutional and subject area contexts.
All the information about how you can apply and analyse the data collected through the use of the four tools can be found in the CALOHEA Protocols for monitoring student workload consultation and analysis.
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.
