Studying Teaching Time

Reinheimer, David A. “Teaching Composition Online: Whose Side Is Time On?” Computers and Composition 22.4 (2005): 459-70. Print.

Reinheimer is responding to the (still) common concern about the amount of time online courses require of their instructors, especially compared to the time requirements of face-to-face (F2F) courses. Through his literature review, he explains that the evidence that online courses require more time of instructors is too sparse, too anecdotal to be administratively useful. While he says time-use research in distance education fields is a bit more detailed, these studies focus on teacher-centered pedagogies instead of the student-centered pedagogies more typical of composition instruction. Therefore, he hopes a quantitative study will produce some firmer conclusions about composition faculty workload related to online courses.

To collect his data, Reinheimer relied on the time-use recording of his participants. The first participant (the F2F instructor) was a teaching assistant who had taught in two previous semesters; the second participant (the online instructor) was the researcher. The data collection began in the semester the F2F course and the researcher’s first online section were offered. Reinheimer continued compiling data from his online courses in two subsequent semesters. The participants kept track of time spent only on student contact activities (e.g., direct communication with students, grading/assessing work, office hours). His initial results showed the F2F course requiring almost one third more time than online classes. Since the F2F course had set course meetings (and thus a pre-established minimum of contact time) and more students, he divided the time spent on each course by the number of students, arriving at time spent per student. This new calculation demonstrated that in the first semester online faculty time spent more than twice the time per student than did F2F faculty. This disparity did shrink dramatically in the second and third semesters of the online course. Reinheimer attributes this decrease in subsequent semesters to improved technology, course maturity, and instructor experience. Based on these results, he ultimately argues that faculty and administrators should discuss possible solutions to these workload concerns.

Anyone who has taught an online course and tried to demonstrate to others the amount of work and time needed to develop and deliver such courses can appreciate what Reinheimer is attempting to do here. However, I do have a few quibbles with his methods. First, the fact that his quantitative data comes from the self-reporting of his participants makes assessing their accuracy difficult. (On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure how else one might measure this more objectively.) Second, he only used one F2F course as a basis for comparison. Having data from the same number of online and F2F courses might allow one to make some more definitive claims. Finally, since the F2F course and online courses were taught by different instructors, we could easily argue that the differences in time spent per student were based wholly or in part on the instructor and not necessarily on the method of delivery. That being said, understanding these as concerns may serve to improve future studies.