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[yemaya]

Is 3 chapters of reading (about 70-80 pages) too much reading to assign in an online history survey course?  Students will have a (short) reading quiz and discussion posts due that week too.  It's from a textbook.  The language is straight-forward, but with a fair amount of detail.  I'm thinking that I will assign the reading, but give students a list of key concepts to help focus them so that they don't panic and try to memorize everything.

[offthemarket]

This has to be a joke.  This is a college class.  Eighty pages of reading, in a history class?  It seems too light to me.

[yemaya]

This has to be a joke.  This is a college class.  Eighty pages of reading, in a history class?  It seems too light to me.

To me, it's very light for a college history course.  I'm used to assigning a lot more than that in my weekly face-to-face courses.  But the university is not a particularly competitive one and I'm getting noises from the powers that my expectations are too hard on them.  I'm new to online teaching and to this university, so I'm not sure if I'm dealing with an entirely different breed of student or what.

[caesura]

Is that eighty pages for the whole term? 

[johnr]

Eighty pages a week? 

[blackadder]

That's 11 pages a day, give or take if there are pictures and charts and graphs. Seems pretty light to me since I assign far more than that.

Is this summer or fall/spring course?

[yemaya]

It's 80 pages a week.  It's an 8-week fall term gen. ed, that's intended to cover what the 16-week face-to-face courses cover.  It's not a diploma mill, but admissions aren't all that competitive.  It's not a full-blown KC, but they're sensitive about retention.  At my former institution (temporary position), I'd have had no issue with assigning at least twice that. 

[conjugate]

I think it would be okay.  Just make sure you outline your expectations clearly, and warn them repeatedly of the dangers of falling behind in the reading.  An explicit note in the syllabus to the effect of "...students are responsible for reading and understanding..." might help in the event of complaints, but might not.  Sure, you'll get evals that say, "Oh, Prof. Yemaya makes us read way too much," but you'll get those even if you only assign 10 pages of a comic book for the whole semester.

Caveat: I'm in Math, and my expectations are more in terms of student output rather than input.