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An Analysis of Variation in Teaching Effort Across Tasks in Online and Traditional Courses

As the role of the internet and internet technologies continues to grow in pace with the rapid growth of online education, faculty activities and tasks are changing to adapt to this increase in web-based instruction. However, little measurable evidence exists to characterize the nature of the differences in teaching effort required for online versus traditional courses. This paper reports on the results of a quantitative study of instructor use of time which investigates not only total time expended, but also examines differences in types of effort. The basis of the study is a comparison of seven comparable pairs of online and traditional course sections where instructors recorded time spent during course instruction for the seven pairs. This paper discusses relevant related work, presents the study motivation and design, discusses how teaching effort varies across different tasks between online and traditional courses, and presents thoughts for future research. The results of this study indicate that instructors of online courses spend more time on direct interaction with students when compared to instructors of traditional courses, but spend less time on other activities such as grading and materials preparation.