Sorry if this seems to have a tenuous connection to teaching but can someone explain the difference between 'Academic hours' and 'Real Hours' please. I have seen courses advertised using both. For example if a course is 80 real hours, so 4800 minutes, how many Academic hours/minutes would that be? How do you work this out?!
Thanks in advance
Academic Hours (a maths question?)
Moderator: Josef Essberger
Re: Academic Hours (a maths question?)
A real hour is 60 minutes... that one is simple.
An academic hour depending on the institution is either 40, 45, or 50 minutes. There seems to be no global understanding on how long an academic hour is.
As I understand it, the idea was initially that in a real hour only this time was actually spent learning (when you consider the time lost to arriving at class, getting ready to leave, generally mucking about). So someone just decided to cut off the wasted time and make lessons shorter - so now rather than doing an hour lesson and learning for 45 minutes, students do a 45 minute lesson and learn for 30. This is how I understood it, but it may be wrong.
So 4800/45 = 107
An academic hour depending on the institution is either 40, 45, or 50 minutes. There seems to be no global understanding on how long an academic hour is.
As I understand it, the idea was initially that in a real hour only this time was actually spent learning (when you consider the time lost to arriving at class, getting ready to leave, generally mucking about). So someone just decided to cut off the wasted time and make lessons shorter - so now rather than doing an hour lesson and learning for 45 minutes, students do a 45 minute lesson and learn for 30. This is how I understood it, but it may be wrong.
So 4800/45 = 107