Dear Staff and Students,

In 2012, Council approved the implementation of the credit point system at USP based on the Bolonga model (European system of credits). The total credits for a three year undergraduate degree is 240, based on 10 credits per semester long course.

While this has been published in the USP Handbook and Calendar, its implementation in all courses requires collecting data on Learning Hours (LH) from all students in every course, and comparing it with the postulated LH in those courses by the course co-ordinators. Following this exercise, LH in the courses should be adjusted to ensure that a student spends approximately 200-250 learning hours to pass a course based on the learning hours to earn 1 credit being between 20 to 25. The learning hours to earn 1 credit remains the same in all disciplines.   

This semester we are hoping to collect this data in all our face to face courses (and some online courses). For this we need students to provide us with this data on how long they spend doing activities (formal and informal) in their courses, from week 1 till they sit the exams (essentially 18 weeks).

To implement data collection activity, the Chair of Senate has approved the following process and required adjustment in the assessment component of all face to face (and some online courses):

1              A continuous assessment of 5% be allocated to every undergraduate course at USP that will be requiring data collation on student LH as a one-off assessment

2              This assessment, regarded as continuous assessment, will take place over 18 weeks (from week 1 until the students have sat the exam for that course)

3              The marks to be divided into weekly activity and upon completion of the weekly task of recording the time spent on the week’s activities in a table provided to them on Moodle they can earn 0.27% mark. The marks allocated until week 15 will contribute to their continuous assessment. The marks obtained over the next 3 weeks will count towards their final mark in the course

4              This assessment is based on building the generic skill of Professionalism – demonstrated by the development of their basic time management skills over the semester. Professionalism is one of the 7 Institutional Graduate Outcomes for USP. Successful completion of this task is expected to build basic time management skills

The activity and assessment is given below for inclusion in the course outlines:

 A table will be created in all course Moodle shells and students will be asked to reflect on the time spent in the various activities in each course and enter this time in the appropriate columns once every week.

 Please await the inclusion of the workload data table in your course Moodle shells by the end of week 2 with guidelines  of how to input data.

The University Credit Points Committee is urging all staff and students to please participate in this activity to help bring all our courses in line with the credits that have been allocated to them.

We look forward to a successful effort in collecting workload data this semester.

Thanking you all in advance.

Dr. Anjeela Jokhan

Chair, USP Credit Points Committee