Design and teach a course

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Course planners and study schedules

A detailed time budget or study schedule will let the students know exactly what is expected of them for each week of the course.

It should include times and timings for ALL course activities - attending or viewing lectures, attending tutorials, reading and noting readings, reading and contributing forums posts, studying for exams and tests, actually doing exams and tests, and working on other assignments. It should also include deadlines such as assessment submission dates.

If your planner is online, you can link each entry in the planner to the actual activity on the course website. 

Preparing this type of detailed planner is actually a good exercise for you to undertake when you are planning and designing the course, because it gives you the opportunity to visually represent and observe the pattern of activities which you will expect your students to follow throughout the course. 

Note that normally, you should not ask for students to devote more than 10 hours per week for all course activities (10 hours x 4 courses in a FTL adds up to a 40-hour per week study load). 

You can see an example of part of a study schedule/guide below (these activities would all be linked on a course website). You can also see another example, using a Moodle book to lay out the tasks for each week.