Credit Hours without Seat Time Theatre: Documenting Student Work in a Digital U.S. University

Abstract

U.S. credit-hour culture still smells like seats. This Frontier paper shows how online modules document expected hours through task design, not through a webcam of a lecture hall. External reviewers accepted logs that mapped readings, problem sets and seminars to hours when faculty had actually designed to that budget. They rejected ‘equivalent to three hours in class’ as a sentence without artefacts. Frontier Innovation University should keep credit-hour files as research-grade evidence. An HLC-facing digital pathway lives or dies on this paperwork.