Assigning credit for topic-based/non-traditional courses

[Chrysalis Academy]

This came up in the Finland/reform thread, but it's really a spinoff so I thought I'd ask it here.

 

When you do self-designed, nontraditional courses, particularly multi-subject or topic-based courses, how do you go about assigning credit?  Do you count total hours and then divide?  Do you eyeball it?  Do you do something else?

 

Example: for a Great Books course that covers both history and literature - do you just count total hours (so, 240-360) and then divide by two, and assign two credits?  Or 2 1/2 if there are enough hours?  

 

Another example: for an Integrated Science class (w/ labs) - would you list it as Integrated Science, or would you try to divide it out for purposes of having an easily interpretable transcript?  How about Integrated Math, say if you cover geometry & Alg 2 concurrently? This seems like an easier case, because there is a more standard body of information that is covered in math classes, I think.  Non-traditional science seems trickier.

 

Do you actually count hours? If so, how?  Particularly if your kids choose their own schedules rather than working an hour a day per subject.  This seems like it could turn into an unwieldy counting nightmare.

 

I get that for traditional subjects, you can look at a body of work - a textbook completed (or a reasonable percentage therof) - or a number of books read and papers written.  But for a non-traditional class this seems trickier, which would then lean me toward counting hours.  But I'm curious about what "counting hours" actually looks like in your homeschool.

 

 

[regentrude]

For DD's integrated history/literature course, I counted the hours and gave one credit each for history and literature since the number of hours justified it. With DS I no longer count, but just estimate, since I now have an idea how much we accomplish in roughly how much time.

 

An integrated science course I would list as such and not sort out the portions, because that would lead you to many fractional credits fro each science topic each year and would make the transcript confusing.

For different concurrent maths, I award credit for each separately upon completion.

 

For completely self-designed courses in electives I estimated the hours.

 

Counting hours was very easy. My kids do not have a schedule and work on whatever they want for how long they want; they simply had to log the hours spent on each subject, and I would put them into an excel spreadsheet that I had programmed to calculate time per day and time per subject.

[Chrysalis Academy]

For DD's integrated history/literature course, I counted the hours and gave one credit each for history and literature since the number of hours justified it. With DS I no longer count, but just estimate, since I now have an idea how much we accomplish in roughly how much time.

 

An integrated science course I would list as such and not sort out the portions, because that would lead you to many fractional credits fro each science topic each year and would make the transcript confusing.

For different concurrent maths, I award credit for each separately upon completion.

 

For completely self-designed courses in electives I estimated the hours.

 

Counting hours was very easy. My kids do not have a schedule and work on whatever they want for how long they want; they simply had to log the hours spent on each subject, and I would put them into an excel spreadsheet that I had programmed to calculate time per day and time per subject.

 

 

Interesting - can you tell me a little more about the mechanics of this? Did they have a paper log, or a calendar, or did they do it online? I like this idea.   How often did you enter their hours? I imagine you'd want to check periodically to make sure they aren't skewing too heavily toward one subject and leaving others out.  

 

Did they track time spent on all their courses, including electives?

 

Did your spreadsheet track hours per subject daily? Weekly? Or something else? I'm envisioning what this would look like . . . 

[regentrude]

Interesting - can you tell me a little more about the mechanics of this? Did they have a paper log, or a calendar, or did they do it online? I like this idea.   How often did you enter their hours? I imagine you'd want to check periodically to make sure they aren't skewing too heavily toward one subject and leaving others out.  

 

Did they track time spent on all their courses, including electives?

 

Did your spreadsheet track hours per subject daily? Weekly? Or something else? I'm envisioning what this would look like . . . 

 

They jotted it down in their paper planner. I'd get to entering it in the spreadsheet about once a week or so.

I mandated the total time they must spend on school, and they just logged how they divided that. I took care of outside scheduled classes etc.

 

My log spreadsheet was very simple. I had one file for each month.

First column had all the days. Then there were two columns for each subject; one to note the topic/chapter, the other to list the time. I programed a formula that added all the time cells of one row, to find total time spent each day (very convenient to spot where we did not do the full amount of time), and a formula that added each time column to determine time per subject.

And then some analysis on the bottom, total time for core subjects etc. Once it's programmed, you don't have to think about it anymore and it does everything. Very easy.

[Miss Mousie]

We're still in 8th grade (and our first year HSing), but we too log time.  I designed a form that lists all subjects, and each day DS logs each task in the appropriate subject and the time he spent on it.  Sometimes he'll have two entries for the same thing - for example, if he read his novel for a half-hour in the morning and then another 45 minutes in the afternoon, he'd have two entries for that.

 

Every Saturday I take his daily log sheets and tally up the time for each subject and for the week as a whole in my own master "Administrator's Notebook."  I do it all by hand, just because I rather enjoy it (I know, I'm weird!) - but doing it by hand also helps me keep in mind the overall rhythm to our weeks and what comes out to be "standard output" for us in a week - whereas if I had a spreadsheet it would be just a sea of numbers to me and wouldn't really register in the front of my mind.

 

For a self-designed interdisciplinary course, then, this would work as is.  If we were integrating history and lit, I'd probably just halve the total hours between the two subjects.  If we did integrated math or science, I'd probably just plan to make the transcript by subject and not year.

 

 

[MerryAtHope]

What we've done is to simply have my kids work an hour per day on classes like this. I keep a simple daily schedule page where I jot down chapters read or if they are working on a paper or research etc..., just for my own notes to keep up on what they are doing (and it gives me a sense that they really are putting in that hour per day). Then I easily know when they have enough days in for a semester or year-long class. 

 

If I had a student who preferred to work in more of a "block schedule" type of format, then I'd have them keep a simple logbook of hours.