The LDT program’s courses are delivered using a Wednesday to Tuesday lesson schedule. This weekly schedule is also used by faculty of the Curriculum and Instruction (CI) courses at Penn State, which is another group that serves a large K-12 educator population. LDT and CI have been deeply thoughtful about our lesson schedule, and we have maintained this schedule throughout pressure to conform to the Monday to Sunday schedule that is used by most of World Campus. Here are the key reasons for our use of a Wednesday to Tuesday lesson schedule:
Working Students’ Schedules
A Monday to Sunday schedule emphasizes that work be done on the weekends, particularly on the Sunday due-date for weekly assignments. Many students who are involved with K-12 education and who have children or other personal obligations are in a position where they either (a) must do virtually all of their coursework on the weekends, or (b) are unable to do any of their coursework on the weekends. By shifting to a Wednesday to Tuesday schedule, the calendar “weekend” is moved to the middle of the lesson week, and therefore the weekend becomes less critical for students to keep pace with their coursework.
Balanced Faculty Workload
Given the variety of student schedules that will naturally emerge in a class of 20+ students, it is unfortunately very easy for faculty members to be swept into a seven-day-workweek. As is the case with our students, faculty members have families and personal obligations outside of work, and it would be neither conducive to personal mental health nor equitable with other university faculty teaching to expect an instructor to be teaching every day of the week. By shifting the calendar weekend to the middle of the lesson week our faculty members have a chance to disconnect from their digital lives, rest, and prepare themselves for the work week ahead. Remember that a special benefit of the LDT online program in comparison to other university’s online programs is that our online students are taught primarily by our core tenure-line research faculty, and not fixed-term contract faculty.
Availability for Lesson Start and End
By human nature Monday workdays are challenging after enjoying a typical weekend. We do not want our coursework to add to the noise of life—why pile onto an already stressful day. By having lesson weeks conclude on Tuesday nights we are reducing the pressure faced by our students. Furthermore, if students have questions about assignments prior to submission, a Tuesday night submission deadline allows students to write to their instructor, receive a response, and apply the response to their coursework prior to submitting it. The same is true for the start of a new lesson on Wednesday: students can review the lesson, process it, and ask questions to the instructor prior to “diving-in” and working on their weekly activities. Sunday deadlines and Monday starts only exacerbate the effects of fatigue and pressure created by the calendar week-end, to the detriment of students and faculty members alike.
Overall, our Wednesday to Tuesday schedule is a student-centered, thoughtful, and holistic approach to online course delivery that has been successfully implemented since the inception of the LDT online programs since their launch in 2005. It is a distinctive characteristic of the LDT program because it is an opportunity to model the thoughtful learning design practices that we teach to our students. And given that students usually complete their entire certificate or degree program with LDT course offerings, it is often the case that students do not know any other lesson schedules.