A graduate course consists of approximately 44 hours of class time that I will refer to as professional contact time.  Further, the graduate school standard requires that the graduate student complete at least 3 hours of course related activities outside of class for each hour of in-class time in any given week.  This means that for this 3 credit Grantsmanship course there will be 3 hours of class time (various forms of contact time) each week, with 9 hours of related course activities outside of that time.  As a campus we are experimenting with how to measure this professional contact time and how to judge its effectiveness when utilizing distance education technology, particular online asynchronous (not in real time) communication.   As we move to Independent Study mode in this course, it is important for the course participants to keep close track of this data and regularly share it with your instructor.  If you have other suggestions on how to improve this progress-development data sharing, please let me know.  This web page explains and describes a table log of your professional contact time that you will be need to develop and keep as a part of this course.

Measurement Professional Contact Time

Below, I provide a model for a table that you will need to copy into your own Professional Contact Time web page.  This copying goes quickly and easily if you are using Netscape Communicator 4 (or later) web page editor called Composer.  You can use the new row command to add on to the table as needed (Insert/Table/Row) or simply press the TAB from the last bottom right cell of the table.  If you wish to keep this table more private, you do not need to make a link to it from your web home page.  Simply create and update the page on the server of your choice and bookmark it to conveniently retrieve the page.  Once the page is operational, send me its web page address so that I may bookmark it as well.  I will share this web page address with Dr. Haynes who co-advises on 077 certification as needed.  Should an official of the Graduate School or other WCU administrator wish to evaluate our Independent Study work, I will send them a current printout of your Professional Contact Time web page or share the web page address as they prefer.

In-person meetings and telephone, online chat or online audio conversations are a simple total of the time involved.  Online asynchronous (not in real time) contact time will be a total of your correspondence time.  By correspondence time I mean the time it takes for you to read my correspondence to you and for you to compose your email to me and/or responses to my email.  The time you spend in the library, or do online searching, contact with off-campus grant officers,  compose in your grant diary, or complete other course related reading and composing activities is part of your nine hours of weekly "outside-of-class" course activities and is not professional contact time.

[Also, you will create a course notebook to document your outside-of-class activity.  This means that it is important to keep a diary as a part of this notebook, a logbook section that notes the time and duration of your work and summarizes the activity of a given hour(s). The description or summary of your work should be sufficient to account for the time spent.  For example, you might indicate what book, chapter and pages you were reading and reflecting on or indicate the web page address you were reading. Be specific.  It would be insufficient to say that you read for 60 minutes.  The table below with appropriate modifications should serve as a summary or top page to your course notebook.  Because of the reflective nature of such work, time spent developing these progress logs should definitely be included in your progress log.  It is not required that you create a web page for this "outside-of-class" activity, only for professional contact time.  This web page will not discuss the course notebook further, but further questions should be addressed to your course instructor.]
 

I have the following expectations with regards to this Professional Contact Time table:

• weekly email updates indicating your progress and questions;
• approximately 3 hours per week of "contact time" ;
• Independent Study allows great flexibility in activity levels, but to make steady progress, weeks with low contact time should be balanced by weeks with high contact time ;
• I will receive email notice of when you update the table.  Once a week would be sufficient.

At the conclusion of your course, this table must be printed out and included in a Grantsmanship notebook that you submit to my office.