The Instructor Time Audit: Where the Hours Actually Go

How much time does running a course actually take once the teaching is done? Across this site we say instructors spend 8 to 14 hours a week on operational work. This post shows where that estimate comes from.

We have not run a formal survey, so we are not going to quote one. What follows is built from three sources you can check: published research on faculty workload, our own informal conversations with instructors, and arithmetic you can redo with your own numbers.

What published research says

In a 2013 time-use study at Boise State University, thirty faculty members kept time diaries over two weeks. Participants averaged 61 hours of work per week, and the researchers, led by anthropologist John Ziker, found that roughly 30 percent of that time went to meetings and administrative tasks unrelated to teaching or research. The sample was small and self-selected, which the authors acknowledge, but the pattern was consistent across participants.

For online teaching specifically, Van de Vord and Pogue compared online and face-to-face teaching time in a 2012 study in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Face-to-face teaching took more time overall, but the evaluation and communication parts of online teaching, exactly the work this post is about, took considerably more time per student online.

Neither study gives a clean number for operational work in an online course. That is part of the problem: this work is largely invisible, including to researchers.

The arithmetic

Take a common load: three sections of thirty students each, with a weekly discussion that requires an initial post and peer replies.

That is at least 90 initial posts to review every week, before counting replies. At two to three minutes per post to check word count, deadline, and reply requirements, discussion review alone is three to four and a half hours. Student messages, participation tracking, reminders, and policy documentation stack on top:

That lands between 7 and 12.5 hours in an ordinary week, and spikes higher around midterms and finals. This is the basis for the 8 to 14 hour range we cite. It is an estimate, and the assumptions are on the table so you can rerun it for your own course load.

What instructors tell us

We talk with instructors in online and hybrid programs regularly while building MyTA. These are informal conversations, not a survey, so we will not dress them up with percentages. But the same three things come up almost every time:

• Discussion review is the biggest sink. Checking the same rubric against post after post is the task instructors mention first and resent most.
• The work is repetitive judgment. Most of it is applying a fixed policy to routine cases, with an occasional case that genuinely needs a human decision.
• Nobody sees it. This time shows up in no workload model, so it comes out of evenings and weekends.

Run the audit yourself

If you teach, track one week. Every time you review a post, answer a routine message, or chase a missing submission, log it. Most instructors we have talked with are surprised by the total.

That repetitive execution is what CourseOps and MyTA automate, with every action going through instructor review before it reaches a student. And when we have real usage data worth reporting, we will publish it as a case study with the actual numbers, not as an anonymous survey.