summer term versus regular term

Summer courses meet for 5 weeks rather than the usual 15 during the Fall and Spring terms.

If we use the American higher ed rule-of-thumb guideline for in-class to out-of-class work (2 hours of homework for every hour spent in class), then for my usual courses, a student should spend 4 hours a week in my classroom and an additional 8 hours reading and doing assignments. When I asked about the institutional culture on this point at New Faculty Orientation a couple of years ago, after one of the administrators had been going on and on about the need for rigorous standards, he basically admitted (in not so many words) that the expectation at my institution was considerably less. HOW much less, he would not say.

(Thank you very much for THAT guide to cultural norms, dude. I believe they call it "don't ask don't tell" in other contexts.)

So now comes the summer course. Forget for a moment that it's online and thus that students already expect it to be easier and/or less work. If it meets for 1/3 the time as a regular-term course and students get the same amount of credit as for a regular-term course, then they should be putting in 12 x 3 = 36 hours a week on my course.

Yeah, like THAT could possibly happen. Yet another one of the institutional lies of higher ed.

I want to be a LEETLE more rigorous than the norm, but I don't want to go crazy.