I'm wondering if we're getting too polarized here.
I agree that time-on-task is the not the ultimate goal. But I am not ready to agree there is zero correlation between time-on-task and student learning. If that were true, it doesn't make sense to have 3-hr, 4-hr, and 5-hr classes. Is it no longer the case that we can expect that average students who passed a 5-credit-hour astronomy course will know more astronomy than average students who passed a 3-credit-hour astronomy course?
I would say I measure quality of product. My student's don't get any credit for spending 10 hours on a lab report. They get credit for turning in a good lab report. If it's good, I don't care if they cranked it out in 30 minutes or 10 hours. I am close enough to my students to know it's a rare student who can go from raw data to a good report in 30 minutes, yet I have a fair number of students who think they can do a good report in 30 minutes. They don't get good grades, and are apt to complain that the only way to get a good grade in my class is to spend more time than they have available. They're correct that they need to spend more time. They're not correct that the time is unavailable. They might be correct if they say their other courses don't require as much time. That's where I have my problem. I don't like it when the average student thinks my classes require too much time. They would be less likely to say this if their other professors held them to a higher quality of product that required them to spend similar time to what they spend for my courses. So it's not that I want the other profs to require busy-work to get more time-on-task. Rather, I want the other profs to require a quality of product for which the average student needs to spend a reasonable amount of time on the product.
We need to have some standards on this, because I don't want my students to have profs with so high of standards that the students need to spend 20 hours a week just to pass a 3-hour course. And I also don't want them to have profs with such low standards that they can pass the course with almost no out-of-class time.
I have an older Ohio State University Bulletin that has wording I like. It's not in front of me right now, but I can pretty accurately quote it from memory... One hour of credit is assigned for each three hours of student work, including class time, that the average student must spend each week to earn the average grade of C.
This provides a reasonable link between time-on-task and quality of product. The student is graded on quality of product. If the average student must spend more than 3-hours per week per credit hour to attain a C-grade for quality of product, then the professor is too demanding, or the assigned course credit to too low. If the average student is spending fewer than 3-hours per week per credit hour to attain a C-grade for quality of product, then the professor is too easy, or the course credit is inflated and needs to be lowered. If the average student is spending about 3 hours per week per credit hour to attain a C-grade for quality of product, then this is normal and we would not judge the professor as too demanding nor not demanding enough, and we would not judge that the credit value assigned to the course is incorrect.
Viewed this way, student learning/performance is the criterion, but we are offering protection to the students from profs who could indeed be too demanding and thereby create hardships for students who have other courses and other obligations... and we are offering some protection to students (and other faculty) from professors who don't demand a high enough quality of product and thereby cheat the students and hurt the reputation of the department and institution.
Certainly this type of wording and interpretation seems pretty different from the way the law is stated. I don't know if that's because the people who wrote the law have a screwed up viewpoint, or if quality of product is indeed the goal and they just didn't state it very well. I fear they might be motivated more by dollars and cents... that is... it all boils down to money rather than student performance.... the government wants to relate tuition cost to hours spent on task rather than student outcomes. I would certainly agree that if this is the intent, then it is the wrong approach.
Michael D. Edmiston, PhD.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Chair, Division of Natural and Applied Sciences
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
Office 419-358-3270
Cell 419-230-9657