Background
The Committee on Teaching convened this discussion because it is our perception that student workloads have become so burdensome in recent years that they are counterproductive to students' educational experience at Oberlin. Jane Armitage of Theater and Dance and Robert Thompson of Chemistry began the discussion by giving personal observations on the topic, Jane from discussions with her students and Rob from an informal study of end-of-semester assignments gathered online syllabi that he conducted for EPPC (see Appendix). Faculty members who have taught at Oberlin a substantial amount of time further observed that student workloads at the college used to be more uniform when quizzes and exams were a more common way of tracking student learning; now big papers seem to be more in fashion and it is rare to give a final exam, at least in humanities departments. Science departments still rely on quizzes and exams, but are also employing more inquiry-based pedagogies, such as collaborative projects or discovery-based research, that change the timing of work assigned in their courses.
Some participants in the discussion didn't think students actually had more work than in the past, but rather that there has been an increase in students' anxiety about it. It may also be that the amount of information students deal with is very different now and changes in the technologies they use to access that information present new challenges to our methods of teaching research. What we need to figure out is, what can we do to help students through the new pressures created by our changing habits of instruction?
By the end of the discussion, both advice for fellow faculty members and recommendations for cross-curricular thinking emerged.
Advice for Individual Faculty Members:
Faculty can assist students in developing the time management skills necessary to handle a contemporary academic load at Oberlin by breaking large assignments into smaller stages more frequently spaced throughout the semester.
If assignments are broken down into small stages, faculty can encourage students to view early stages as an opportunity to experiment rather than a mock version of a final paper, thereby reducing the pressure they feel at that stage and encouraging them to generate more fruitful (and satisfying) ideas.
It's useful to analyze what the reasons students start papers late might be, whether it's procrastination created by poor time management or their inability to start something until sufficient information has been covered in a course to enable them to start. Simply advising students to start large assignments "early" may not be effective because their sense of "early" is so different from ours. Collaborative group work, Alta Vista Forum or listserv discussions, etc., can be ways of helping students generate ideas earlier that they can then pursue in sufficient time to get the most out of assignments. Such methods can also help students with weaker skills catch up by observing first hand what skills other students bring to initial tasks in an assignment.
Cross-Curricular Recommendations:
More consultation between departments and instructors about scheduling of exams in large courses that students frequently take at the same time would be helpful. (Biology and Chemistry already do this and might provide a model for accomplishing it for other departments.)
It would be helpful to students and their advisors if there were a faculty could submit information on assignment due dates, exams, etc. This could perhaps be gathered on a standard form turned in by a specified date so that students and other faculty could be aware of workloads in different courses when putting together schedules during ADD/DROP or at some other early time in the registration process.
The structuring of Reading and Examination Periods needs to be reexamined. The rules regarding making assignments during reading period work better in some fields than others. In some fields (especially in the Humanities where longer final papers and fewer timed examinations are used) Reading Period may be too short for significant work. Ways of redistributing the time for longer reports, shorter exam times, and different ways of handling take-home exams should be considered.
The institution needs to recognize that different styles of pacing assignments can affect faculty workloads--more frequent, shorter assignments lead to more needs for response; faculty need to be informed about ways of handling the extra work.
It would be helpful to further study these problems if COT or another group in the college conducted a more exact survey of assignment practices of the entire faculty. The faculty might also benefit from researching how our practices compare to those of faculty at other comparable institutions.
Appendix: October 1999 memo to EPPC by member Rob Thompson on END-OF-SEMESTER STUDENT WORKLOAD