Maximum playload?
Hmm, just got the aggregate course survey results from the College of Arts and Sciences for last semester’s KM/LIS 5433. One really startling statistic is that the course apparently was perceived by the students as having the lowest workload of all courses in the department “at a similar level.”
Don’t have the student comments yet, but I’m rather curious as to why this is so. There were actually more assignments than I usually give, and the final projects were actually more complex than I usually see. (See the 5433 “Virtual Project Fair” tab above.) And the “amount learned in this class” percentile was very high indeed.
Maybe because a lot of it didn’t seem like “work” to people?
Or maybe I just need to impose more rigid requirements?
*sighs*
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Categories: theorywatch
teaching
FWIW, I always thought that was an odd question, since perception of workload depends so much on whether or not I was engaged in the class. When everything’s clicking, when I’m in the flow — when it doesn’t seem like an assignment without purpose, or a reading stuck in for lack of anything better — the workload doesn’t matter.
It is highly subjective, isn’t it? I can only hope that people were so absorbed in what they were doing that it didn’t seem like “work,” but I suspect I’ll never know!