L9 3 1

=Institutional policies define expectations for student workloads within courses. =

Evidence
Students need to understand what the instructor expects of them. This is particularly so in e-learning because often students have difficultly getting timely answers to important questions. Instructors should provide clarity by posting not just course materials, but policy documents in a prominent section of the course site (Waterhouse & Rogers 2004).

Calculations of student workload sometimes produce a significant mismatch between what teachers predict students will need to do to complete the work to a reasonable standard and what students believe, or actually do (e.g. Tampakis & Vitoratos 2009).

Students often study much less than higher education teachers expect them to (e.g. Kolari et al. 2006, Zuriff 2003). Kolari et al. (2008) found that students use only 63% of the time allocated to the course. It may be that students simply don’t know what is expected of them, or what to focus on studying (Chambers 1992, Thomas et al. 1991).

Institutional staff must agree upon student workload expectations and this must be consistent across courses.

Resources
Institutions across the European Union are attempting to standardize courses so that qualifications are transferable. The overarching aim of this Bologna Process is to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) based on international cooperation and academic exchange. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) has been developed over the past thirteen years, and today is the most commonly used basis for measuring student workload in European higher education.

The ECTS credit system is to provide comparability across European Institutions (Wagenaar n.d.). This system is based on student workload. One credit stands for about 25-30 hours of student time. A four step method should be used to implement the system. 1.	Introduce modules 2.	Estimate student workload 3.	Check/evaluate the workload with students 4.	Adjust workload

This ‘Tuning’ approach (Wagenaar n.d.) makes use of the ‘notional learning time’, which is the number of hours which it is expected a student (at a particular level) will need, on average, to achieve the specified learning outcomes at that level

Tuning offers two forms that can be helpful in making decisions on and adjustment of the student workload (Wagenaar n.d.). The first form is for the teacher to plan the educational module and estimate the student working hours involved. The second is for the student to indicate the actual amount of time spent on the module.