The Learning Experience: The Gift of Time

"The clock, much like time itself, is a gift and not to be tampered with."

~Orvus. Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time

Most of you reading this will most likely have your driver's license or at least some type of state ID. We all have had to go to the BMV for something with our car or license and had to wait an obscene amount of time for a very simple issue. Even when your number gets called, go up to the counter, ask your question, and then get told you do not have the necessary materials. You drive back home, get whatever you need, then have to sit and wait again.

Luckily, we live in a time when, instead of having to drive to the BMV to take care of plates or driver's license renewals, we have online ways of addressing those specific problems. I even recently saw a kiosk at my local grocery store where I can actually get my license plate renewal printed out there. It helps save me time because while I'm buying a gallon of milk for my Cheerios, I can also renew my plates. I saved time!

Time is a valuable resource we have. We only have so much time in the day, week, month, heck even lifetime that we have to spend. Even writing these articles, I make sure the time I use to write them is well used, as well as the time you, the reader, are making to read this.

In the last reading on The Learning Experience, we talked about assignments at length, and one factor described was how long it took to complete assignments. We are going to dive deeper into the aspect of time today, but less on the homework aspect and more on the overall time your students are spending on your course and how to justify that the time they have spent is valuable.

What is Time?

When you think about time, you have to think of time as a resource. Every student has only a certain amount of that resource to spend every day. There is the phrase "time is money," and while I do not equate money and time directly in this instance, students only have so much time to spend, just like they have money. Every day, they only have so much time to spend, and sometimes they may have to use that time credit card to borrow time from a different day. If you make students max out their time credit card, they will feel overworked, and then you are causing them harm. No, seriously, I had heard stories when I was an instructor about how other instructors were making students spend way too much time in the classroom and out of class, and a single class stressed students out to the point they started developing health issues. I also made a mistake during my early days of teaching college of giving an assignment that students were so lost and were stressed out to no end on the amount of time it took. I had to take a step back and evaluate how I had students spend their time. Just because you're getting paid full-time to teach, you must assume that your students are going to have a different amount of time to put into the course.

When I entered college, my university had a way to help students budget time, where every credit hour of a course meant about three hours of time you should dedicate to the course. A typical course load was 15 credit hours, so just in school, a student needed to budget 45 hours of their week to just school. That is more time than most jobs, and on top of that fact, the student's social life, as well as work, is going to need to be sacrificed somewhere. Are we asking students to crunch? Just being a part of the tech world, crunch culture runs rampant. Do we want students having panic attacks, mental breakdowns, hospitalizations, and emotional damage just because of the amount of time you're asking a student to put into your course? When you think about that with your course, keep these in mind. There is no reason, even if you had to as a student before that you should cause physical or emotional harm to a student because of the amount of time required for them to achieve what they want out of the coursework.

So far, I've mentioned a ton of the side effects of time and how it can affect students. Some of you are probably like, "Okay, Luke, get to the uplifting stuff, or else YOU are making my time reading this article depressing." Okay, fair point. I think we should do that now.

Spending the Time

The first biggest note on time in the student's learning experience is how long students are in class and on what days of the week they are in class. You may only sometimes have control over the number of days each week; as I know from working at a boot camp, there is a certain requirement for accreditation where a student has to spend X days to be accredited in said subject. What you do have control over is the amount of time they spend in class. When I taught college, my courses had an hour and fifteen-minute window where students would be present. I usually ended up finishing the demonstration within 45 minutes and told the students they could stick around to start working on homework to get a head start, or they could take off. There was no reason to keep them hostage in a course for an extra 30 minutes or so if there was no reason to. What is nice about this, is you get to give the students a decision about how they use that extra time in class. They can leave and beat traffic on the way home, or they can use it to ask questions about what they learned that day. You give the students the choice of how they spend their time in class rather than forcing them to spend their time. It creates a healthy environment for both you and the students. Sure, I would like to have the students leaving earlier who need help to spend more time asking questions. Forcing them to stay when not all their eggs are in the basket creates unnecessary tension in their lives. 

Something about longer class periods I have found in the realm of software development is that if you're trying to teach students for two and half hours, even with a built-in break, you create the holding student hostage situation again. If you finish early, you feel like you wasted the student's time as they are gauging their time around over 2 hours, but at the same time, students spending 2 hours during a demonstration feels like a slog for both you and the student. I love teaching about responsive design in web development, but I even know that 2 hours of that is too much. Even if you attempt to do something like a flipped classroom method for 2 hours, the students almost feel as if they now have to create two hours of learning themselves. Is that what they paid for?

In the boot camp environment, the student and instructor mentality treats it much more like a "workplace" environment, so spending a full 8-hour day in a classroom feels more natural. That means we're teaching for only half of that time. A large portion of that time is used to mentor and build students up for those who have questions. However, if a student finishes work early, let's say 3 hours early, you now have to find a way to fill in that time if the student has allotted that time for coursework rather than personal life matters.

This juncture is where the instructional aspect comes into play, building out resources for the different ways that students decide to use their time credit cards in your course. If a student finishes early and has things to do in their personal life, don't hold them back from doing so. If they do finish early and are craving more content, make sure to have items on the back burner so they feel like they are spending their time wisely. With software, we usually have resources that are advanced concepts for the day, which is perfect for someone who finishes early and has a better understanding of the material.

Instructor Time-Share

I mentioned this in the last writing, but you also have to think about how you want to spend time in the course as the instructor. Spending hours at a time grading could be a better use of time, especially when I pride myself on getting student feedback as quickly as possible. If I hate grading what I assign the students and it takes me too long to grade because of it, it's harming the students more because they are not getting their grades back fast enough. I built my assignments in a way where I could give quick feedback and still have it detailed so the students understood what they could do to improve. These rubrics took semesters of refinement to get to the point where I could grade final projects fully based on the rubric in under 10 minutes per project at a maximum. Software development is a different wheelhouse compared to other careers, but going back to my previous writing, you should not be creating assignments you do not want to grade.

I had to assist my CIT department at Purdue with this situation of reading because students were not getting grades back in some of their courses for 2 months at a time. That is 2 unnecessary months of waiting to see if they're even passing the class. You want the biggest kick in the head: wait until the last month of a course to get a bunch of grades back, finding out you've been doing stuff wrong for 4 months at a time and failing. What I find worse is that the instructor cares so little about whether you improved or not and gives everyone in the class a passing grade. Now, a student spends 5 months learning material they have yet to learn if they even understand it or not. 

We, as instructors, also have to gauge how much time we want to put into the course. If it's taking too much of our own time, and we do not enjoy certain aspects of the course from our perspectives, students will notice. Students are not dumb.

Conclusion

Time is a very emotional piece of us we spend every day. We only have so much of it, and removing factors that make us feel as if we have less time is going to create a more positive experience overall. When you are planning your next course, begin to think about the time investment your students will need to have and the possible mental factors that could affect them while participating in your course. At the same time, think about how YOU, the instructor, want to spend time on your course to also bring back a feeling of accomplishment rather than going through the motions. Time is a gift, and we should be gifting our students and ourselves time, as its our most precious resource.

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The Learning Experience: Is it a Product?

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The Learning Experience: The Assignments