Instructional Minutes Requirements

Last updated: 7/8/20 10:19 a.m.

Asbury Credit-Hour guidelines

We MUST adhere to our stated policy for student credit-hours.

Based on the AU definition below, we must make sure that undergraduate students are actively engaged with the course content through classroom or direct faculty instruction for 750 minutes per credit-hour and a minimum of 1500 minutes of out-of-class student work. This can be a blend of many modalities, if it can be documented. This includes modalities such as synchronous and asynchronous, face-to-face, ZOOM, videos, podcasts, streaming-content, etc. utilizing both faculty-guided inquiry and student-initiated work.

AU Definition of Credit Hour

• AU shall meet or exceed the Federal definition of a credit hour. The federal credit hour is an amount of work that reasonably approximates not less than:
  1. One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or
  2. At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution, including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.
• Asbury University has established the credit hour to be represented by minutes of guided faculty instruction and minutes of student work across all forms of instructional delivery resulting in equivalent learning opportunity.
• The standard for AU is: 
  • 750 minutes per credit hour for undergraduates including the final examination 
  • 1,400 minutes of instruction at the graduate level.
• Guided instruction decreases as the expectation for student investment increases (see Table 1.).
• The understanding of contact time and student work effort is the same across all formats of coursework including face-to-face, online, hybrid.
• The University requires courses to have a three-hour final examination the last week of the term.