When I go with my family to a well-known chain restaurant, it's not really an adventure. No-one needs to consult the menu; we always order the same thing. The dish is predictable, functional, reassuring and more than filling. And the cole slaw is always “traditional,” no matter what.

When I think of how time is organized in university education, I notice something similar. We aren’t very adventurous. In most universities, we usually talk about fall and winter terms, each more or less three months long. The typical university course is three hours a week, most often in one block. In most disciplines, the full-time program is organized so that students juggle three, four or five subjects each term. Exam periods don’t vary much: midterms and finals, which take a great deal of logistical effort to coordinate over a 15-day period. That’s how it was when I started teaching, nearly 40 years ago. And it hasn’t changed much since.

I sometimes wonder how this came to be: after years of trial and error, have we really found the best way of doing things right, from a pedagogical point of view? I doubt it. Of course, the standard schedule has several advantages. It greatly simplifies the logistics involved in assigning classrooms and scheduling. It allows the teaching staff—both professors and lecturers—to manage other professional commitments more easily, including the time devoted to research and mentoring. For students, it may encourage some interdepartmental or inter-faculty mobility. It’s also conceivable that a block of three consecutive hours allows for more in-depth discussion, field trips, or sustained activities in the lab.

But one might also imagine that a three-hour block could get boring if the course isn’t well-structured or planned in a way that keeps students attentive and active. Three hours is a long time. It would be no surprise if, as the course dragged on, they started scrolling through social media on their phones or computers. Teaching a subject over 12 or 13 weeks, multiplied by four or five courses, might actually be too hard to sustain, mentally. Or, conversely, it’s conceivable that the three-month period might be too short for students to acquire skills.

There are no simple answers to these dilemmas, but it seems to me that we should address them all the same. How a course is organized in terms of time, just as its material is organized, should ideally be conceived of in terms of pedagogical objectives rather than systematically conforming to a standard whose validity has ceased to be questioned. There’s nothing immutable or magical about either the three-hour block or spreading a course over a whole term.

Other formulas exist, at Université de Montréal and at other institutions of equivalent calibre. There are courses offered in shorter blocks, two or three times a week; courses given in an accelerated, intensive period, as you sometimes see during the summer session—one subject at a time for three or four weeks, for example; courses spread over two terms to give students time to assimilate the content; hybrid courses in which the time spent in the classroom each week is not the only time that counts when combined with the use of other communication platforms; and even courses in three-hour blocks where the time available is used in a varied and dynamic way, linked to the courses' learning objectives.

Put simply, we should be able to fit the schedule into the course, rather than fitting the course into the schedule. In an ideal world, the time frame for teaching would be more flexible, more fluid, better aligned with the aims of the course, based on best teaching practices.

I’m not naïve. Changing a paradigm is complicated, and the material and logistical constraints are not imaginary. But the excitement that comes with challenge is real, too. As the saying goes, “With great risk often comes great reward.”

Next time, I’ll go for creamy.

Daniel Jutras

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