Educator's hub
Estimate your course workload
If you've moved from practice into teaching, one of the first puzzles is how much work a course should ask of students. Enter what your syllabus requires and this estimator adds up the hours, then compares them with what your course's credit hours expect.
Every figure is an estimate. Students vary widely, and each rate below can be changed to fit what you know about your own.
Where this comes from. Adapted from the Enhanced Course Workload Estimator (Workload Estimator 2.0), research and design by Betsy Barre, Allen Brown and Justin Esarey, Wake Forest University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Link. The reading and writing rates, and the research behind them, are explained in their estimation details. Link.
Changes made in this adaptation by Rahim Thawer, The Politicized Practitioner®:
- Added practice assignment types used in social work education, with editable hours.
- Added a comparison with expected credit hours, a breakdown by activity, and a syllabus statement.
- Replaced the single "other assignments" entry with a list, each counted as independent or contact time.
- Audio and video discussion posts use one rate throughout (one hour for every three minutes posted).
- Added a separate line for field practicum hours.
The original and this adaptation are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Link. You may reuse and adapt it for non-commercial purposes with credit and under the same licence.
Look Through More Than One Lens
Categories help organize the collection. They aren’t meant to keep issues separate from one another. Across the collection, four questions are especially useful.
What is this doing to behavior, relationships, identity, development, health, or wellbeing?
Who benefits? Who decides? Who is surveilled, excluded, exploited, displaced, or harmed?
What environmental, material, labor, and global systems make this technology possible—and who bears their costs?
What should social workers and other helping professionals, educators, researchers, organizations, and policymakers understand, question, challenge, or change?
A single resource may belong to several areas and raise questions through several of these lenses.
How the Collection Is Built
Keeping up with this field manually is increasingly difficult. So this collection uses AI as part of the process of tracking AI.
Automated searches regularly identify potentially relevant new scholarship, policy developments, professional guidance, public-interest research, and significant reporting. AI-assisted tools help screen for relevance, identify duplicates, suggest categories and tags, and prepare concise summaries.
Automation helps find and organize the material. It does not decide what is true, important, or authoritative.
Resources are reviewed before they enter the public collection. Inclusion does not mean that The Politicized Practitioner endorses a source, organization, argument, technology, or finding.
The collection is intentionally selective rather than exhaustive. Its focus is not every development in artificial intelligence. It prioritizes developments that help us understand AI’s implications for people, relationships, inequality, institutions, communities, professional practice, and the broader social conditions in which helping work takes place.
The Question Behind the Collection
AI is frequently presented