It’s hard to tell from the outside what universities are talking about these days, because there is this veil of secrecy up about what planning is happening.  But I’ve heard that, at a couple of schools at least, the focus is very much on the question of credit hours.  As in, “credit hours = contact hours, so if your course isn’t completely synchronous, how do we know students deserve three credits?”

Sigh.

There are short and long answers to this question.  The short answer is: does the course cover the same material it did last year?  Has the professor made best efforts to ensure that the assignments are of the same level of difficulty?  Then don’t mess with the credits.

The longer answer is: credits as currently designed are a flaming garbage heap of a concept and it would be great if we could re-design them from the ground up.  Here’s why:

The idea of “credits” as a way to divide up the curriculum has its origins as a pension accounting unit.  About 120 years ago, when the Carnegie Foundation was busy trying to improve the quality of North American education, it mostly focussed on the fact that professors were badly paid and so the profession didn’t attract the best people (times change).  So, Carnegie hit on the idea of topping up people’s pensions.  The only question was: how would they know how much to top up for each professor?  Answer: measure how much time they spent teaching.  Thus, a standard “credit hour” became fifteen weeks at 3 hours per week of teaching and (in theory) two hours of student prep work for each hour of class.  More or less, that’s still considered standard today (though one obvious variant is to give one credit hour per one hour of teaching, which is why a single course is often described as a “three credit” course).

Variations over time have made this “standard” description even sillier over time.  The “two hours course prep per hour in class” thing is…well, let’s be kind and say it is more of a guideline than a standard.  And of course, the number of weeks is lower now (usually either twelve or thirteen weeks) and in Ontario some schools it’s only two hours per week.   Within Ontario, for instance, there are some schools where a credit is 2*12 = 24 hours of contact per term while others are 3*13 = 39 hours per week and we still pretend both of these things are the same thing.  And wonder why credit transfer might be a problem.

(Actually, this underpays the nature of the problem.  About a decade ago, I was at a Universities Canada meeting when the discussion turned to learning outcomes and credit hours. The moderator of the panel I was on asked for a show of hands with respect to how many institutions actually had a formal definition of a credit hour.  Only about half went up, implying that half of Canadian universities have no definition of a credit…and if that’s the case, what does an undergraduate “degree”, which is based on the accumulation of a lot of credits, actually represent?)

In Europe, they took a slightly different tack.  Back in the 1970s, the Dutch universities set out that a standard academic should involve 1680 hours of work (42 hours/week * 40 weeks – they have longer school years over there).  From there, they developed a credit system based not on “contact hours” but “student work hours”.  Eventually, when the ERASMUS program was developed and European universities realized they needed a common way to measure learning if European-wide student mobility was going to become an actual thing, the European Credit Transfer System was developed based on the Dutch example. This is why all of Europe has a system of credit based on “estimated student effort” rather than “contact hours”.  So, for instance, in the UK, a term may equal 30 ECTs (normally in Europe, a degree equals 180 ECTS credits), but only 8 contact hours per week.

(I am indebted here to Robert Wagenaar’s excellent new short history of the European Credit Transfer System, which is nerdy and picayune as all hell, but there are way too few studies like this that actually help researchers understand the origins of the administrative underpinnings of modern universities – the “plumbing” that everyone takes for granted.)

Now there are a whole bunch of difficulties with the European method.  For instance, these estimated hours: are they what is necessary to pass the class?  Or just get an A in the class?  And how do you really know how much student effort is required?  (there are various ways of estimating this: Rice University has a handy calculator here).  Does the difficulty or level of the course matter?   None of these are simple questions, and in Europe they came to quite different conclusions about this at the university level and the vocational level.  Nevertheless, the approach has had its admirers – the Australian Qualifications Framework, for instance, does not get into issues of individual credits but it does have standards around annual “volume of learning” (which is lower at 1200 hours per year).

The details are perhaps somewhat beside the point, but it does seem as though the shift to an online semester would be a whole lot easier if we had some standard other than contact hours.  Indeed, credit transfer as a whole would be a lot easier if we had a standard other than contact hours. And omg if people are going wild inside their own institutions right now about credit hour integrity, think about what a nightmare credit transfer requests are going to be in January and September 2021 when students who switched schools for a year as a means of coping with the uncertainty of the fall term – and trust me, there are going to be a lot of them – start asking for their effort to be recognized.

The middle of an emergency is not a time to think about reforming something as fundamental as the credit hour.  But as my friend Dave Cormier (whose wife reliably informs me is not a genius as I declared a couple of weeks ago, but I still think is pretty smart) said in this excellent survey of re-thinking the course hour in the age of asynchronous learning:

This is just another case where the digital has forced us to consider our first principles. What do we want the ‘outcome’ of a university education to be? As we consider how granular, how technical, how mastery-based we want our outcomes to be we are deciding what it means to be a knower in our society. Our schools have been both drivers for creating drones to work in our factories and an attempt to be places of free thought to allow us to change as a society. They are – always – normative. The way we build them and the ways in which we adjudicate success inside them will be reflections of the society we created… whether we’ve thought about it or not.

As I say, now is a bad time.  But a re-think of the credit-hour, the basic building block of degrees, is long overdue.  Put it on your calendars for 2021-22.