海角社区

According to the most recent Fact Sheet, 66% of our students are enrolled in at least one online course, and 33% of our courses are online or hybrid (1). That pattern is both steady over the last few years and a huge change from the situation 10-15 years ago.

Question: How much work is teaching?

Regardless of course format, one question comes up often:

How much time should it take to teach a course?

Meaning, when a faculty member is assigned as the instructor of a 3-credit course, how many hours of work should they put in? (This is often expressed as 鈥渉ours per week,鈥� but we all know that the work is often lumpy, such as spending many hours preparing before the semester starts, or extra hours grading at certain points in the term.)

Answers

The structural answer:

There is an absolute answer built into the structures of universities, 海角社区 included: Teaching 12 credits is the bulk of a tenure-track professor鈥檚 job, with the remainder being service and scholarly/creative activities. Let鈥檚 imagine a made-up breakdown: 70% Teaching, 20% Scholarly/Creative activities, 10% Service. (This is just for discussion, not official in any way). That would mean that teaching gets 28 hours a week, 4 of which are required to be Office Hours (FEH), leaving 24 hours to teach 12 credits! So, the answer, according to the structures of the job, is ~2 hours of work per credit being taught, per week. (If you change the percent above down to 60% or up to 80&, this will shift a bit, but not that much).

The messy reality:

Of course, any instructor will tell you that the total time commitment varies hugely, and that it is really difficult to know how much total time it actually takes. If I spend 15 hours preparing the WarmUp assignments before the term starts, does that translate into 1 hour less each week during the term? Who knows! Few (if any) instructors track their time closely enough to really know, though there groups that use surveys to track trends. The FSSE Survey, for example, uses self-reported data across various categories. The 2025 results show that for each hour of class time, faculty report spending about 2.2 hours preparing for class, meeting with students and grading, and another 1.1 hours on course administration and improving teaching (2).

Overall:

Between the structural answer and the messy reality, we can at least give a broad, squishy estimate. A 3-credit class requires 6-12 hours a of instructor work per week.

As college faculty, what do we think our (teaching) job actually is?

[I鈥檓 going to put my faculty hat on here and speak in the first person.]

Along with asking how much time it should take to teach a course, we need to discuss how that time is spent! If I am paid to teach a course, what is it that I鈥檓 being paid to do?

Create materials?

Am I hired because I will create effective and engaging materials? That might have been true decades ago, when information simply wasn鈥檛 available elsewhere. But in the 21^st century, there are astoundingly good resources online for almost every topic. Access to information is now trivial, and the information is better than it has ever been (3). Creating content can鈥檛 be it.

Deliver content in an engaging way?

I recently taught my Physics of Nature students about free fall physics. Am I the best lecturer in the world on that topic? Not a chance! If the fates have done their job, the actual best-in-the-world free fall lecture is on YouTube and has millions of views! We also know that the very concept of 鈥渄elivering content鈥� is a misconception about how humans learn (4). So, for several reasons, delivering content can鈥檛 be why I鈥檓 paid.

Side note:

I worry this is a lesson some faculty took away from the pandemic lock-down. Faculty teaching online asynchronous courses sometimes talk about the hours and hours they put into creating dozens or hundreds of videos. In these moments I am tempted to interrupt and say: “That isn’t your value! That isn鈥檛 what your students need from you!鈥�

There are other professor side-quests that I will set aside for now. Let’s cut to the chase.

Communicate, engage, give feedback, and care.

So, if the materials I prepare and my skill at delivering content aren’t the primary value that I bring, what is? Why should students spend thousands of dollars to take my course?

My answer: The value I bring 鈥� and the reason I should be paid 鈥� is primarily about connecting with students, structuring their learning experience, giving them effective feedback (separate from grades), and being present!

And, when I view this from the perspective of supporting faculty at 海角社区, here is my assertion:

For the vast majority of courses at 海角社区, academic departments (with explicit and concrete support from the rest of Academic Affairs) should do the work to provide excellent materials to faculty. Faculty should get 鈥渙n-boarded鈥� to each course, with whatever training and support they need so that they know how to use those materials.

And then, maybe, we can say to them

鈥淣ow, use this foundation to go do the hard work: Communicating, engaging, caring, knowing, giving feedback, following up, and all of the high-touch, person-to-person interactions that make teaching effective.鈥�

鈥�

But, perhaps we will be stuck in the old model for a long time. In many cases across campus we hire faculty, give them the official syllabus and say 鈥済o!鈥� They hit the ground with a blank slate course and an empty Canvas shell. Or maybe they get materials from generous colleagues, but without explanation or grounding. They may justifiably think 鈥淎h! My purpose here is to create learning materials and deliver them to students. It is then the student鈥檚 job to learn from what I deliver.鈥�

海角社区鈥檚 Brand

As generative AI disrupts all of higher education, I think we are in a moment where we can take 海角社区鈥檚 brand and sharpen it even further. Students have a thousand opportunities to take highly automated courses in which faculty are barely involved, or try out programs where if they learn on their own (or from generative AI chatbots) they can take exams to earn college credit, never making meaningful contact with another person.

I think 海角社区 could be positioned at the opposite end of that spectrum. Maybe a future student can say:

聽鈥淣o, they didn鈥檛 replace the professor with automation and AI. I think what they did was create solid course frameworks and effective administrative support systems so that the professors have time to focus on the students. I was connected to them on a weekly basis in a way that really impacted my learning and my sense of belonging.鈥�

Okay, that was a wildly unrealistic hypothetical student quote. But I hope you will look past the hyperbole and look for the aspiration that I think we can aim for.

Notes

1. , Feb. 4^th, 2026
2. collects data related to instructional staff contributions to and expectations for student learning and development. They have a that shows interesting results that can be filtered to more closely match 海角社区. I filtered that table and then compared the averages for 鈥淭eaching Class Sessions鈥� to the total of the other 4 categories.
3. 鈥淔or a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, 鈥榃ikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,鈥� Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. 鈥� July 2023, New York Times.
4. You can go back to Paulo Friere in , where he critiques of the 鈥淏anking Concept鈥� of education. But there were others decades earlier, and many since.

This isn鈥檛 meant to be a thoroughly researched, scholarly position paper. If you see something I鈥檓 getting wrong, I hope you will let me know so I can learn more!

The featured image is a collage of free to use images, by conntonbro, Creatopy and Veera Batlu (left to right).

Generative AI disclosure: After writing this piece I used generative AI to write a first draft of the short 鈥渢easer blurb鈥� that went out by email. I used ChatGPT to make a collage from the three source images. I used ChatGPT to look at the history of arguing against the “information delivery” model of teaching.
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