teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) annually surveys college students to better understand how they engage with college.  NSSE proposes that student engagement includes two criteria, one of which is “the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities.”  Highlights (lowlights?) from the National Survey of Student Engagement, Annual Results 2011 (click through for the full 52 page report) include:

• 80% of seniors in business perceives substantial gains in job- or work-related skills (tied with engineering for second place behind education).  I guess we are teaching most of them something useful.
• Only 19% of senior business majors spend more than 20 hours per week preparing for class (dead last among 7 majors).  Business students average just 14 hours per week outside of class — also lowest among the seven majors.
• College of business faculty also have the lowest expectations of how much time their students are spending preparing for class — just 15 hours. Here at Teach the 4 Ps we have written about “The Debate Over Academic Rigor in B-Schools” (April 19, 2011).  Are our low expectations contributing to the perceived lack of rigor in our classes?
• Senior business majors spend an average of 16 hours per week working for pay — the highest among all majors (a full 3 hours ahead of second place “social sciences”).

I find the results very interesting.  When I first started teaching, I was told to design a class where my students would have about 2 hours of homework for every hour in class.  So in a 3-credit hour class, a student should expect 6 hours per week of homework.

I still try to work toward that goal, but students complain about the workload and I have tempered my expectations.  This semester my students are reading 18 chapters in a text book, spending a minimum required 25 minutes per chapter on LearnSmart (which most use as a test study tool — there are about 150 flash cards per chapter — though adaptive learning means they probably do less and many spend about an hour, making it their primary or only test study tool), doing 15 Connect homework problems (about 15 minutes each), writing a personal marketing plan, and doing an optional marketing simulation (takes a reported 4 hours to complete on their own).  If I assume that students take 1.5 hours to read a chapter, spend an hour per chapter on LearnSmart studying for the test and 8 hours to write the personal marketing plan (a 4-6 page paper) — this adds up to about 60 hours over 15 weeks.  This is only four hours of homework per week.  Is this too much?  I think my students will say “YES?” and my ratings may suffer.  But I am tenured and I do think my assignments are more than busy work.

How do you design your classes?  How many hours per week do you expect students to spend on your class — outside of class time?  Has this changed over time?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Tips for Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.