16 Course Load Estimation

Course Load Estimation

What you want your students to learn as a concept, be involved in for engagement, or get assessed on to achieve the learning objectives somehow needs to fit within the course term and weeks of module coverage.

The Rice University course load estimator guide balances the activities and assessments that are assigned within the specific module of the HyFlex course.

For example,

To estimate time for assigned readings,

• the estimator recommends considering reading rate which is a function of three factors: 1) page density, 2) text difficulty, and 3) reading purpose.
• the optimal reading rate of a skilled adult reader (including college students) is around 300 words per minute. This assumes a “normal” reading environment in which there are no new words or concepts in the text and the purpose of the reading is to understand the meaning of each sentence (Rayner et al., 2016; Carver, 1982).

Reading Purpose

• Survey: Reading to survey main ideas; OK to skip entire portions of text
• Understand: Reading to understand the meaning of each sentence
• Engage: Reading while also working on problems, drawing inferences, questioning, and evaluation