Calculating contact hours (internal)

Page(s) shared publicly:

Understanding schedule distribution, standard meeting patterns, and contact hoursPreview

Internal information:

Exceptions to contact hours (classes we don’t need to calculate), AND related exceptions to other schedule type listings vs schedule type actual:

• School of Law:
  They use ABA (American Bar Association) rules for accreditation, and they don’t use standard meeting patterns.

• School of Social Work - SOWK 9101, SOWK 9102:
  These classes are usually offered in cross-list pairs (one Lecture, one Online). Colette has approved (in INC0666209) that the Lecture sections don’t need to meet in person, and that they don’t need to fulfill SACSCOC minimum contact hours.

All other contact hour exceptions should be built into the related CLSS rules when coding of those exceptions is possible (and updated as needed).

Based on a December 2025 conversation between Colette and Jessica Shedd:

• Registrar Scheduling: The scheduling team should not be in the position of evaluating syllabi or judging whether learning hours are sufficient. That responsibility sits with the faculty and the appropriate curriculum committees.

• Schedule Type:
  If a course does not fulfill the required contact hours based on its listed meeting pattern and is relying on additional work outside of class time to make up the difference, it should not be scheduled as a Lecture.
  For now, those courses should be scheduled as Hybrid, even if the additional work is asynchronous.

• Documentation:
  For courses scheduled as Hybrid, we can require a syllabus to be submitted/documented to demonstrate how the full learning hours are being met. This is not for Registrar review, but as institutional documentation and a signal that the alignment of contact hours with credit hours does matter.

• Curriculum Oversight (Going Forward):
  Longer term, if departments want to continue offering courses with limited in-person meeting time for full credit, that structure should be explicitly reviewed and approved by the appropriate curriculum committee (either course-by-course or as a group), with documentation that the credit hours were approved despite the meeting pattern.

• Trust, but Verify (Lightly):
  For now, we don’t need to retroactively audit Spring 2026 sections. Going forward, the expectation should be clear:
  Lecture = meets contact hours
  Doesn’t meet contact hours = Hybrid + syllabus documentation

I (Colette) will plan to raise the broader policy question with Provost Robin Forman to see whether we want more formal guidance at the university level, but this approach should give Meredith and Shelby a consistent and defensible path in the meantime.

Thanks again for flagging this — I appreciate you being proactive about it. Please let me know if you have any concerns/questions.