Okay, maybe not so glamorous. But the section on our syllabi where we include the required contact hours and out-of-class student work required is an important issue, not only for students to gauge their time commitments, but also to assure HLC that we are compliant with federal regulations. A.R. 3.6 requires that we include information about instructional contact hours and out-of-class work in our syllabi.

A.R. 2.3.1 tells us that a credit hour equals one hour of classroom direct faculty instruction (can be online) and a minimum of two hours out-of-class work per week for a regular 15 week semester. An equivalent amount of work is required for other types of learning like labs, internships, or studio work. So for a typical three credit hour class for 15 weeks, that would be 45 hours of direct faculty instruction and 90 hours of outside work for the student per semester. If we wanted to put that into a weekly amount, it’s 3 hours direct faculty instruction and a minimum of 6 hours outside work per week. We could let our students know that 9 hours per week would be required at a minimum to complete a 3 credit hour class in 15 weeks.

The syllabus template for GCC has had a few updates to better reflect language from A.R. 2.3.1 and to include a link to multiple examples of contact hour calculations based on credit hour and length of course.

Can you do the calculations? Do you have questions about the calculations? Drop into the CTLE and let’s get glamorous with calculating the contact hours.