Difficulty ratings and TripAdisor-ing your class

I just got back from attending The Teaching Professor Technology Conference for the first time. It was a very well-run conference of about 600 attendees. That many people passionate about teaching (and technology) energized me. Of course there were presentations about the latest tech tools, but several people, including the keynote speaker, talked about putting pedagogy before the flashy tools. Spot on.

I love it when I learn something that seems obvious in hindsight. Here's one of those for me: students (especially first-generation students like I have at EKU) don't necessarily know how much effort we expect them to put into each assignment. Something we might think should take 1-2 hours they might think they can shoot off in 20 minutes. I wager that faculty's time estimates are inflated, so perhaps time is not the best metric to use. But imagine if faculty gave students some indication of the effort they estimate and expect an assignment would take.

One of my classes is about information literacy and I've been thinking of indicating the difficulty (or expected effort) of each assignment using a information source analogy. For example, easy assignments could get a rating of text or Facebook post (quick and easy to read). More difficult assignments could get blog or news article, and the most difficult could get journal article. You could also use a more familiar star rating or some other symbol. I think this might help students schedule their studying and avoid surprises. I'm a bit concerned about the difficult ratings on the hardest assignments scaring or intimidating students. Perhaps including some language about growth mindset would be helpful ("We haven't done an assignment this tough in class -- yet").

Another cool idea is to have the students provide their own difficulty or effort ratings of the assignments (after the fact) and then report those ratings the next semester. Perhaps students will trust and take heed of other students' ratings more than professor ratings. This is sort of a TripAdvisor approach to the issue.

A similar idea is to have students write instructions for the course ("read the text first, then do the discussion boards" or "preparing for the tests took more time than I thought"). I've done this sort of thing in some of my classes by asking students at the end of the semester what they wish they had known at the start of the semester, and then giving these to students the next semester. I have gotten some advice that I did not pass along ("drop this class now"), but most of the advice is appropriate and helpful. Again, it has the cache that my advice does not.