What Is the Work of Teaching?

According to the most recent Fact Sheet, 66% of our students are enrolled in at least one online course, and 33% of our courses are online or hybrid (1). That pattern is both steady over the last few years and a huge change from the situation 10-15 years ago.

Question: How much work is teaching?

Regardless of course format, one question comes up often:

How much time should it take to teach a course?

Meaning, when a faculty member is assigned as the instructor of a 3-credit course, how many hours of work should they put in? (This is often expressed as “hours per week,” but we all know that the work is often lumpy, such as spending many hours preparing before the semester starts, or extra hours grading at certain points in the term.)

Answers

The structural answer:

There is an absolute answer built into the structures of universities, MSU Denver included: Teaching 12 credits is the bulk of a tenure-track professor’s job, with the remainder being service and scholarly/creative activities. Let’s imagine a made-up breakdown: 70% Teaching, 20% Scholarly/Creative activities, 10% Service. (This is just for discussion, not official in any way). That would mean that teaching gets 28 hours a week, 4 of which are required to be Office Hours (FEH), leaving 24 hours to teach 12 credits! So, the answer, according to the structures of the job, is ~2 hours of work per credit being taught, per week. (If you change the percent above down to 60% or up to 80&, this will shift a bit, but not that much).

The messy reality:

Of course, any instructor will tell you that the total time commitment varies hugely, and that it is really difficult to know how much total time it actually takes. If I spend 15 hours preparing the WarmUp assignments before the term starts, does that translate into 1 hour less each week during the term? Who knows! Few (if any) instructors track their time closely enough to really know, though there groups that use surveys to track trends. The FSSE Survey, for example, uses self-reported data across various categories. The 2025 results show that for each hour of class time, faculty report spending about 2.2 hours preparing for class, meeting with students and grading, and another 1.1 hours on course administration and improving teaching (2).

Overall:

Between the structural answer and the messy reality, we can at least give a broad, squishy estimate. A 3-credit class requires 6-12 hours a of instructor work per week.

As college faculty, what do we think our (teaching) job actually is?

[I’m going to put my faculty hat on here and speak in the first person.]

Along with asking how much time it should take to teach a course, we need to discuss how that time is spent! If I am paid to teach a course, what is it that I’m being paid to do?

Create materials?

Am I hired because I will create effective and engaging materials? That might have been true decades ago, when information simply wasn’t available elsewhere. But in the 21^st century, there are astoundingly good resources online for almost every topic. Access to information is now trivial, and the information is better than it has ever been (3). Creating content can’t be it.

Deliver content in an engaging way?

I recently taught my Physics of Nature students about free fall physics. Am I the best lecturer in the world on that topic? Not a chance! If the fates have done their job, the actual best-in-the-world free fall lecture is on YouTube and has millions of views! We also know that the very concept of “delivering content” is a misconception about how humans learn (4). So, for several reasons, delivering content can’t be why I’m paid.

Side note:

I worry this is a lesson some faculty took away from the pandemic lock-down. Faculty teaching online asynchronous courses sometimes talk about the hours and hours they put into creating dozens or hundreds of videos. In these moments I am tempted to interrupt and say: “That isn’t your value! That isn’t what your students need from you!”

There are other professor side-quests that I will set aside for now. Let’s cut to the chase.

Communicate, engage, give feedback, and care.

So, if the materials I prepare and my skill at delivering content aren’t the primary value that I bring, what is? Why should students spend thousands of dollars to take my course?

My answer: The value I bring – and the reason I should be paid – is primarily about connecting with students, structuring their learning experience, giving them effective feedback (separate from grades), and being present!

And, when I view this from the perspective of supporting faculty at MSU Denver, here is my assertion:

For the vast majority of courses at MSU Denver, academic departments (with explicit and concrete support from the rest of Academic Affairs) should do the work to provide excellent materials to faculty. Faculty should get “on-boarded” to each course, with whatever training and support they need so that they know how to use those materials.

And then, maybe, we can say to them

“Now, use this foundation to go do the hard work: Communicating, engaging, caring, knowing, giving feedback, following up, and all of the high-touch, person-to-person interactions that make teaching effective.”

…

But, perhaps we will be stuck in the old model for a long time. In many cases across campus we hire faculty, give them the official syllabus and say “go!” They hit the ground with a blank slate course and an empty Canvas shell. Or maybe they get materials from generous colleagues, but without explanation or grounding. They may justifiably think “Ah! My purpose here is to create learning materials and deliver them to students. It is then the student’s job to learn from what I deliver.”

MSU Denver’s Brand

As generative AI disrupts all of higher education, I think we are in a moment where we can take MSU Denver’s brand and sharpen it even further. Students have a thousand opportunities to take highly automated courses in which faculty are barely involved, or try out programs where if they learn on their own (or from generative AI chatbots) they can take exams to earn college credit, never making meaningful contact with another person.

I think MSU Denver could be positioned at the opposite end of that spectrum. Maybe a future student can say:

 “No, they didn’t replace the professor with automation and AI. I think what they did was create solid course frameworks and effective administrative support systems so that the professors have time to focus on the students. I was connected to them on a weekly basis in a way that really impacted my learning and my sense of belonging.”

Okay, that was a wildly unrealistic hypothetical student quote. But I hope you will look past the hyperbole and look for the aspiration that I think we can aim for.

Notes

1. MSU Denver Fact Sheet story in Early Bird, Feb. 4^th, 2026
2. The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement collects data related to instructional staff contributions to and expectations for student learning and development. They have a Teaching Time Dashboard that shows interesting results that can be filtered to more closely match MSU Denver. I filtered that table and then compared the averages for “Teaching Class Sessions” to the total of the other 4 categories.
3. “For a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, ‘Wikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,’ Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. “ Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth July 2023, New York Times.
4. You can go back to Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he critiques of the “Banking Concept” of education. But there were others decades earlier, and many since.

This isn’t meant to be a thoroughly researched, scholarly position paper. If you see something I’m getting wrong, I hope you will let me know so I can learn more!

The featured image is a collage of free to use images, by conntonbro, Creatopy and Veera Batlu (left to right).

Generative AI disclosure: After writing this piece I used generative AI to write a first draft of the short “teaser blurb” that went out by email. I used ChatGPT to make a collage from the three source images. I used ChatGPT to look at the history of arguing against the “information delivery” model of teaching.
ant to know more? Send me an email and we can chat!