For teachers or others familiar with the process:
Given a single average undergrad college class, how many hours a week would a teacher typically devote to the class, including lecture, preparation, grading, and anything else related to the class?
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“Should” be several hours for all of the administrative overhead, particularly if the topic is one that you know to a level less than sufficient to write the textbook for it.
This is irrespective of office hours to help the poor wee undergrads.
In actuality, as I was walking people through an MS Office introduction, I frequently shortchanged the students.
Thus, I worked a very lengthy example in Excel, showing how we can hand crank a linear regression, and then predict the next value for the function, only to discover that a right-click on a chart object opens a dialog that does all that and more.
So much for pedagogy. 😉
I teach a 1-credit lab, and I spend approximately:
30 minutes – 1 hour for lecture
1 hour – 2 hours for consultation and observation while the students work on the experiment
1 hour – 2 hours for grading
1 hour for office hours
For a total of 3.5 – 6 hours per week for a 1 credit hour course. (Multiply times two for me; I teach a Wednesday lab and a Saturday lab.) Most undergraduate classes are three credit hours; your experience may vary. Keep in mind that other than grading, I have to do next to nothing for prep because the lab activities are defined in the manual, and this is my fifth semester teaching the course; I could probably teach it in my sleep.
🙂
I agree with the previous post…
about 4-6 hours per hour of credit seems about right… Furthermore.. most full professors here (UW-Wisconsin) are epected to teach 5 3 credit classes a year in the humanities.. (or at least in history of science)–which translates into somewhere between an average of 30-45 hours a week on their classes each semester–and then research is supposed to be on top of that..