Credit Hour Planner

Turn your course’s credit hours into an hours-per-week budget, then check whether the activities you have planned for a module actually fit inside it.

1. Your course

Course format

Choose a course format

All instructional time happens in one place — either fully online, or fully in a classroom.

Some scheduled face-to-face meetings, with the rest of the instructional time online.

Course basics

A standard semester is 15 weeks. A shorter term packs the same total hours into fewer weeks.

Hours of out-of-class work expected per credit hour, typically 2 or 3.

How this is calculated

One credit hour means one 50-minute period of instruction plus the study time you set above, each week, for a 15-week semester.

What counts as instructional time

The instructional row is seat time — the 50-minute period per credit hour a course meets for. A 3-credit course owes 150 minutes a week.

In a traditional course that is literally class meeting time. In a fully online course there is no room, so it is the asynchronous equivalent: instructor-directed content — recorded lectures, guided activities, anything standing in for a class meeting.

In a blended course it splits. The face-to-face row is what you actually meet for; the online instructional row is the seat time your meetings do not cover.

It is not homework. Out-of-class work is the studying row.

The acceleration rate

A course worth the same credits has to deliver the same total hours no matter how long the term runs. The acceleration rate is 15 ÷ your semester length.

A 15-week term has a rate of 1.0. A 7-week term has a rate of about 2.14, so every week carries roughly twice the work.

Face-to-face meetings are the exception: they stay at their actual scheduled length. In an accelerated blended course the extra instructional time that the meetings do not cover is pushed into the online instructional total.

2. Weekly time budget

0.00 Total per week hours

0.00 Instructional activities hours per week class time, or its online equivalent

0.00 Homework / study hours per week

0.00 Total per semester hours

Where the weekly hours come from
Time type Weeks Acceleration Credit hours Weekly minutes Weekly hours Semester minutes Semester hours

3. Module time planner

Now plan one module. Enter the time you expect students to spend on each activity, and this checks the total against the online hours your credit budget allows for a week. A module here is one week’s worth of time.

Reading and writing: estimate those two with the Course Workload Estimator — run it once for readings and once for writing assignments — then enter the hours below.

That tool is a port of the Rice / Wake Forest Course Workload Estimator, which you can also use directly.

Each activity below shows a suggested time for that activity on its own. They are not a checklist — a module usually combines a handful of these, not all of them.

Reading & writing

Hours per week from the workload estimator, readings only.

Hours per week from the workload estimator, writing only.

A note on these two numbers

The original spreadsheet multiplied both of these by 50/60 before adding them in, which quietly shrank them by 17%. Everything else on that sheet is entered in plain clock hours, and the workload estimator reports clock hours, so this version adds them at face value.

Learning activities

Estimated hours a student spends. Leave anything you are not using at zero.

Learning activities total 0.00 hrs

Assessment activities

Includes the time students spend preparing, not just sitting the assessment.

Assessment activities total 0.00 hrs

4. Does the module fit?

0.00 Weekly online hours available from your credit budget

0.00 Module hours planned everything entered above

0.00 Difference hours