Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has introduced the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) as a learner-centered system for promoting comparability and compatibility. Currently, the academic year workload has been established as 60 ECTS, which supposes between 1500 and 1800 hours of student's work. Curriculums are broken down into modules or course units that correspond to particular learning outcomes and competences, and each one has a number of credits allocated. However, in general, the responsibility for deciding on the teaching method, designing the learning and assessment activities, and estimating the amount of student time required for each activity relays on lecturers.

The definition of university studies according to learning outcomes and student's workload has been challenging, since determining student workload and its distribution among activities (studying, preparing labs, developing assignments, etc) in the context of a certain course is both crucial and challenging. Underestimation is more common than overestimation and can lead to low academic performance rate. When activities require more working hours than expected by lecturers, other are usually left out. Normally, this means students leave complete activities or courses to pass others. Lecturers have realized these problems and have tried to analyze and measure the workload of the activities more carefully to achieve more accurate estimations.

The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we present how the analysis and measurement of workload have been made so far, the tools have been used, the grade of participation of students, and the advantages and disadvantages of each system. Also, we analyze some available tools for this purpose.

Secondly, we present the results of a survey whose goal was to determine how students manage their time on doing their course activities. We have surveyed a set of students at the University of Murcia about the use of tools to plan and track the time they spend in their activities and the interest in having a specific tool for this purpose, and if they would like to receive some notification when their deadline is near. We have also obtained information to know what kind of device will be more suitable for it.

The survey shows that:
1) In general, students consider that they are able to accurately schedule the time they need to do their activities.
2) They consider that is might be useful to know the teachers’ estimation of the time needed for every activity.
3) In general, they do not use tools to track the time spent on doing course activities.
4) They consider that it would be interesting to have a tool to monitor and track the time spent in their activities and to receive notifications when deadlines approach.
5) According to students, smartphones would be the ideal devices for a tool of this kind.

Finally, from the analysis and the results of the survey, we have a discussion on how we could make this process in a more comfortable way, and the different features that a tool developed for this purpose would require. Thus, we aim to provide sight into the considerations to be taken into account so that the tool can be successful. This is key to obtain accurate data that allow the design of activities according to the workload established for the different courses, and, therefore, for the curriculum and also offering better information to the teachers to make a better design of the students’ activities.

Keywords:

Workload, assignment, curriculum design.