Use beyond your institutional boundaries, including the linking of this page to any site other than this one, requires the express permission of the POD Network. To view the terms of the End User License Agreement, click here . This essay is about learning when teachers are not around - it is about out of class learning activity. It argues that you can have a substantial impact on student performance by planning this out of class time and by using assessment as a lever to encourage students to spend their time in sufficient quantities and in productive ways for the enhancement of their learning. Defining what the learning task consists of, specifying how much time is allocated to it, and making sure this time is spent on this task, are critical for making courses work.
Students can spend more time learning out of class than they do in class.
It is significant that in most course descriptions what teachers do in class is described while what students do out of class is not - it is simply not planned in the same way or to the same extent. When I ask teachers how many hours their students are supposed to spend out of class and what they are supposed to do with these hours, I am often met with puzzlement, as if this were not their concern. These teachers were only planning half their course and were leaving the other half to chance. It is difficult to improve teaching sufficiently to have a measurable effect on student learning, though it is possible. Almost all of the examples of dramatic improvements in student learning I have come across over the years have resulted not from improvements in teaching, but from improvements in learning.