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.

Your work will be saved automatically as you go.

Click a section heading to expand or collapse that section.

Your course

Course format

Choose a course format

All instructional time happens in scheduled meetings — in a classroom, live online, or both.

Some scheduled meetings, with the rest of the instructional time self-paced.

No scheduled meetings. Students work through the instructional time on their own.

Choosing a format fills in the meeting hours beside it. You can always change that number afterwards.

Course basics

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

= 2.50 hours a week, or 3.0 fifty-minute periods

Add up the week's meetings: two 80-minute classes are 160. Live online meetings count as well as in-person ones. Labs, studios and clinicals may meet for more minutes than their credit hours cover — that is allowed.

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

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 rows are seat time — the 50-minute period per credit hour a course owes each week. A 3-credit course owes 150 minutes.

Scheduled meetings cover it directly, and a live online meeting counts the same as one in a room. Whatever the meetings do not cover is self-paced: the asynchronous equivalent of a class meeting — recorded lectures, guided activities, instructor-directed content students work through on their own time.

Meeting for more hours than the course carries credits is fine. Labs, studios and clinicals routinely do, and the federal definition sets the credit hour as a minimum rather than a ceiling. The self-paced instructional row simply drops to zero.

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.

Scheduled meetings are the exception: they stay at their actual scheduled length. In an accelerated course the extra instructional time that the meetings do not cover is pushed into the self-paced instructional total.

Weekly time budget

0.00 Total per week hours

0.00 Instructional activities hours per week meeting time, or its self-paced 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

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 self-paced hours your credit budget allows for a week. A module here is one week’s worth of time.

Not sure how long an activity takes? The Learning Activity Estimator estimates a reading, a piece of writing, a discussion and the other activities below from their length and difficulty — then enter the hours here.

Its reading and writing rates come from 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 for the module's readings, from the Learning Activity Estimator or your own estimate.

Hours for the module's writing assignments, from the Learning Activity Estimator or your own estimate.

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 Learning Activity 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

Does the module fit?

0.00 Weekly self-paced hours available from your credit budget

0.00 Module hours planned everything entered above

0.00 Difference hours