There are two basic measures of study load: time in the classroom and progress towards a qualification. Time in classroom attempts to measure the amount of instruction time that a student receives and can be counted as hours of instruction per day or year, counts of the number of courses taken, or a combination of the two. These measures are based on characteristics of the course or on patterns of attendance, not on the programme in which the student is enrolled. Because of this, such measures of study load will be useful when there is no programme structure or when programme structures are not comparable. The second measure of study load is the unit used to measure progress towards a qualification. Such measures focus less on the amount of instruction and more on the “academic value” of that instruction. It is conceivable, therefore, those courses with the same quantity of instruction may have different academic values and they would only be the same if measures of academic progress were made in amounts of instruction.