When you’re thinking about studying, it’s important to consider how much time you’ll need for study and how much time you have available.
It’s up to you to decide if you do one, two, three or four courses at a time as you work towards your qualification. But there are a few important things to think about before you enrol:
- How much time you have for study
- How many hours a week you need for study
- And if you study more than one course at a time, balancing your study workload.
How much time do you have?
With no classes or campus to attend, online distance learning means you work independently and study where and when you want to. So you can develop a study routine that works around the rest of your life – work, kids and whānau or community commitments.
Our Time Calculator will help you calculate how much time you spend on different activities in a typical week. The results are only a guide, but they will help you think about how you can fit study in.
Hours a week needed for study
As a guide allow around 10 hours of study a week for every course you do. And you may need more time when assessments are due or if you have an exam coming up. So:
- one course = around 10 hours a week
- two courses = around 20 hours
- three courses = around 30 hours
- four courses = around 40 hours (that’s eight hours a day, five days a week).
If you study more than one course at a time you may have assessments for each course due at around the same time. So you will need to be able to manage your time to stay on track. Our Student Mentor team can help with this. Find out more about the support you can get while you study
Watch the video for some things to think about to help you decide how many courses will you do at once.
Tip - To check the hours needed for a course go to the course page and look for ‘Workload’ in the grey box on the right.
When will you start your course?
Many of our courses are offered monthly to give our learners the flexibility to decide when they want to start their course.
Check the course page to see the start and end dates. Most courses are 16 teaching weeks, with four additional weeks to allow time if you need assessment extensions or resubmissions and for us to do our marking.
Some of our learners stagger their course start dates to help them manage their workload. If you want to do this, remember to think about how much time you will need for study when your courses overlap. In the example below the workload will be around 40 hours each week in month four.
It may be better to start a new course every two months. This would mean the peak workload would be around 20 hours a week.
Get help to plan your study
If you need help to think about how you can fit study into your life or to decide what qualification to study or how many courses to study at a time you can contact a Student Advisor to talk about your goals. They can help you:
- Decide which qualification best suits your study and career goals and what course to start with
- Plan your study load to make sure it suits how much time you have available
- Work out if you have any study or experience can be cross credited to one of our qualifications.
Call or email and ask to talk to a Student Advisor:
- customerservices@openpolytechnic.ac.nz
- 0508 650 200.
Georgia Daals - Bachelor of Applied Management “I would typically study at mid-day because I would often have morning trainings and then night trainings daily. If I ever had mid-day trainings, I could compensate for my study and take it up again when I had time."
Fitting study in around your other commitments