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Legal Warning: This tool is not currently controlled or managed by MIT (I'm working on that).

Purpose of This Site: This site is meant to better calibrate the stated unit-hours from the MIT Course Catalog (expectations) with the actual time students spend on coursework (reality). This can help instructors dial in the amount of work requested, and help MIT to enforce unit-hour rules to prevent overwork.

For Instructors: Currently only students can access the data they create, plus anonymized distributions of classes for which they are currently registered. We would like to test sending instructors notes in case a course greatly exceeds its unit-hours, or whenever an instructor would like to see anonymized, aggregate data. We will only do so after we (me, the CoC, the UA, and probably more) take all stakeholder concerns into account.

Privacy - What Is Recorded? Only a non-reversible hash of your MIT email address, which courses you're taking, and your weekly unit-hour self reports. MIT Certificates are used to ensure security, and automatically link your hours to the hash of your MIT email address. No other data is recorded for privacy reasons.

How will my data be used? Who can see it? Only you can see your personal data, and there is no link to your identity in the database whatsoever. We plan to allow aggregate data (n≥5) to be shown in two ways: (1) Students can see weekly averages and standard deviations just for their classes, to help calibrate themselves on the difficulty of their courses, and (2) we plan to use this data (just means and standard deviations) to inform instructors whose courses are greatly exceeding the unit-hour load to dial things down. The threshold currently stands at either a 40% unit-hour overage in any given week, or a 25% unit-hour overage for any three weeks. This way we can fix severe problems quickly, milder problems over a bit more time, and get the most use out of the least data.

Why Does This Site Exist? I have heard from a number of students that some courses require inordinate amounts of time to complete. I have also heard that a select few instructors aren't being responsive to requests to better balance/calibrate course workload. I hope that having this data will enable us to fix these issues quickly. This is even more important now when most classes are remote.

No Really, Why? I was an undergrad here in '05, and can empathize with the issues I've heard from many of you. I want to help make the remote MIT experience not just doable, but enjoyable. That can only happen if you have enough time to complete your coursework, and have enough time for hobbies, sleep, and the rest of life.

Hence the title of this site - Do Less, Better (DLB)

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