Course workload calculator

How to use the calculator

1. Enter how many weeks the course runs and the hours of live sessions each week.
2. Add what learners do on their own each week: pages to read, minutes of video, exercises, project work and assessments.
3. Check the assumptions: reading speed, words per page, and how much longer video takes than its running time. They’re editable because your material and your learners aren’t average.
4. Choose who the learners are, or type the hours a week they can really give. The result tells you whether the course fits.

Why workload matters

Workload is the time a course asks of learners, and it’s easy to underestimate. Trainers count the hours they teach; learners also read, watch, practise and redo. Each piece looks small on its own: twenty pages here, two videos there. Added up, a course of “a few hours a week” can ask for twice that.

When the hours don’t fit, learners rarely drop one thing cleanly. They skim the reading, skip an exercise, and play the video faster with nothing written down. The next lesson then builds on preparation that didn’t happen. A realistic estimate before the course starts is cheaper than redesigning it after the first group struggles.

How the estimate works

• Reading: pages × words per page ÷ reading speed. 238 words a minute is the average for silent reading of non-fiction in English, from a review of reading-rate studies (Brysbaert, 2019). Dense technical text, with code, formulas and new terms, is much slower; the 130 words a minute offered here is an assumption, so change it if you know better. Reading in a second language is slower too.
• Video: running time × 1.5, a rule of thumb for pausing, rewinding and taking notes. For a recorded talk people mostly watch through, 1.2 may be closer; for a coding walkthrough they follow along with, 2 or more.
• Exercises: number × minutes each. Time one yourself, then allow more for beginners: you already know where the traps are.
• Project work and assessments: the hours you plan for them each week.
• Contact time is the live sessions; everything else is self-study.

Credits are shown for information. One ECTS credit (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) stands for 25–30 hours of student work, according to the ECTS Users’ Guide (2015), so the calculator gives a range. A US semester credit hour is defined as one hour in class and at least two hours of work outside it each week for about 15 weeks, about 45 hours in all. Both systems award credit for outcomes as well as hours, so treat the numbers as a sense of scale.

A worked example

A part-time web development bootcamp runs for 12 weeks. Each week has two evening sessions of 3 hours, 26 pages of documentation (dense, so 130 words a minute), 120 minutes of video, 8 exercises of about 15 minutes, 3 hours on a project and a one-hour quiz.

That’s 6 hours of contact time and 10.5 of self-study: 198 hours over the course, or about 6.6 to 7.9 ECTS, or 4.4 US credit hours. For part-time learners with 15 hours a week, it’s 1.5 hours too many, every week, for twelve weeks.

How to cut workload without cutting learning

• Remove duplication first. If a video and a reading cover the same ground, keep the one that teaches it better. In the example, cutting the video to 80 minutes (2 hours with notes) saves an hour a week.
• Make exercises build the project. An exercise that adds a piece to the project is practice and progress at once. Folding 2 of the 8 exercises into project time saves 30 minutes.
• Point to what matters in the reading. “Read sections 2 and 4” beats “read chapter 3”. Halving the documentation to 13 pages saves another 45 minutes, and the reading time calculator shows how long each section takes.
• Add weeks, not hours. When everything really is needed, a longer course at a pace people can keep beats a short one they fall behind in.
• Ask learners. After the first weeks, ask how long the week really took. The estimate is a starting point; their number is the one to plan with.

The first three changes bring the example from 16.5 to about 14.3 hours a week, under budget, without dropping a topic. To see where those hours sit in the course, lay the lessons out in the course outline builder.