It’s time to teach — but which time is it? Tracing academic practices through more appropriate time metrics

Academics may be well aware of mounting time pressures but is standard clock-time useful for understanding academic work? Alexander Mitterle, Carsten Würmann, and Roland Bloch look at how teaching is understood in relation to time in German universities. They report how the SWS, a figure related to an individual course frame, can be understood as a quantifiable time classification, but one that functions as an indeterminate time category which views teaching as part of an academic practice that is inherently non-linear and open. The SWS framework opens up possibilities for new ways of how time metrics can represent teaching time.