Abstract:

The standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area establishes, among others, that educational institutions must monitor students' workload in order to validate and refine their programmes. In particular, the European Credit Transfer System is based on the workload students need in order to achieve the expected learning outcomes, including the time spent on independent work, compulsory work placements, preparation for assessment and the time necessary for the assessment. To the best of our knowledge, the published studies involving students' workload are based on subjective valuations that learners provide by means of surveys and quizzes, and there not exist appropriate mechanisms for obtaining objective valuations.

Timesheet management systems, or punching clocks, are applied for recording the amount of a worker's time spent on each job. They usually record the start and end time of tasks. Originally, TMSs were developed for an employer to determine payroll, but nowadays, the application of TMSs is much more ambitious.

In this work, we consider the application of timesheet management systems for measuring the students' workload in higher education centres. Avoiding the possible controversy over computing qualifications based on the actual students' workload, we enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of introducing an objective workload monitoring system in these centres. Besides, we propose a particular timesheet management system and several suggestions aimed at empowering their benefits and reducing the effects of their disadvantages. We conclude that, the cautious application of timesheet management systems in higher education centres may be useful for the actors involved in education programmes (students, teachers, institutions, and the own programme), and it becomes an excellent tool for refining the initial workload estimations, as the guidelines for quality assurance suggests.

Keywords:

Students' workload, timesheet management systems, European higher education area, European credit transfer system.