Keeping time

I first read this article by Joel Marks years ago when I was just starting to teach. As a teaching assistant, I could implement exactly none of these ideas. By the time I got my own classes, I had forgotten most of what was in the article. I discovered it again after some of those first classes crashed and burned. I was never brave enough to fully implement this kind of scheme in a philosophy class, but I did adopt the use of self-reporting and some other elements of contract grading. I was reminded again of the article while thinking about Collo and I think the course might be well suited for something like this approach to grading.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in the article, but the part that interests me here is the strategy of determining grades based entirely on the number of hours spent on the class. I like that idea a lot. It works by having a variety of assignments and a number of hours that need to be spent on each to earn a particular grade. Students are in charge of keeping up with and reporting the hours they spend on the class. For Collo, I imagine this would work by establishing broad goals for the course and a certain number of hours you need to spend on each and in total to receive various grades.

I see a number of benefits here. One is that it is a way of implementing the menu approach I mentioned in a previous post. You could choose where to put your time and energy. You could go to more classes, work on a group project, do more service, go to more outside events, talk about those with others, etc. You would not all have to do the exact same thing and you could alter what you spend time on from semester to semester. Hopefully with more flexibility on how you spend your time, less of your time will be "wasted."

Another benefit is that it provides an easy way to spread things out over the entire semester instead of allowing you to ignore Collo until you can't ignore it any more and then scramble to meet all the requirements. We could divide the hours required for certain grades into weeks or quarters or some other subset of the semester and require at least some minimum number of hours throughout the course.

One challenge is figuring out exactly how many hours you should be spending on Collo. According to this document, "the rule of thumb" is that you should count on spending "an average of two hours per week for every hour spent in a reading or lecture class." I know that's a bit of a joke as a general standard, but for Collo, that would mean 3 hours/per week, or 45 hours/per semester. I really have no idea if that is a crazy number or not. What say you? Could an approach like this work? If so, how many hours is it reasonable to require you to spend on Collo related tasks (keeping in mind that I would like to expand the definition of "Collo related task.")?