Do you know how much time it takes students to complete your course? This calculation tool helps you estimate the workload for your students, both week-by-week and in total.

Use the tool to plan your course when you are completing your outline and syllabus, and deciding on activities and an evaluation plan. The calculator uses detailed metrics to estimate the amount of time students will need for reading, writing, projects, and other learning activities.

Once you have a course summary, you will be able to look at your course syllabus and ask yourself:

• Is this workload achievable given the time constraints of the course?
• Is the course workload fair given the credit count for the course?

Not only is the estimator helpful for giving you an overall picture of course workload, but you can use it to guide students on how much time they should expect to spend on homework and other components.

When asked about the best feature of the Learning Hub, many instructors name the quiz tool for its efficiency in automatically marking quizzes and calculating grading components.

However, the Learning Hub quiz tool is designed to create and update individual questions one at a time. To develop multiple questions, you’ve had to use a software program called Respondus, which lets you create questions in a more familiar program like Word and then copy them wholesale to the Learning Hub. Unfortunately, Respondus has a lot of frustrating downsides—finicky formatting requirements and compatibility restricted to the Windows platform, to name a few.

To simplify bulk question management, the LTC’s Course Production team has developed QCon as a better tool for converting questions for use in the Learning Hub. Here are the main improvements that we’ve built into the program.

Key Benefits of QCon

1. Platform: QCon is web-based, which makes it much faster and available to users of different systems (i.e., Mac).
2. Formatting: In Respondus, correct answers are designated with an asterisk placed before the list number, which means you can’t use automatic list numbering. In QCon, correct answers are formatted with the asterisk after the list number.
3. Error detection: Although both programs require questions to be formatted a certain way for the conversion process, many users find Respondus’ conversion error messages confusing. QCon provides clearer feedback to help you fix your documents.
4. Randomizing answers: Both programs allow you to randomize answers, but Respondus makes you choose one or the other and then manually change the exceptions in the Learning Hub one at a time. QCon lets you designate exceptions up front.
5. Images: In Respondus, the Media Wizard is used after questions are imported to add images, videos, or other media. In Qcon, images can be embedded right in the question in Word.
6. Random pools: If you’ve created a “random pool” of questions in the Learning Hub, it’s difficult to see them all at once because normally only a portion of the questions will be selected and shown. This makes it difficult to manage your Question Library. By using Qcon, you can work with all your questions outside the Learning Hub, which makes it easy to see everything you’ve developed.

To find out more about how this conversion tool works with Learning Hub quizzes, see Overview – Qcon Guide (bcit.ca).