What kind of time commitment do I need to plan for if I am participating in lindera: an online herbal intensive?

Time commitment is a hard thing for me to quantify for people, because I just think about plants all the time.  Also, I understand that people learn differently, and have different life, work and family situations that can affect how they go through the ideas & information in the course.  I feel somewhat hesitant to suggest that there's a "best" amount of time to spend that would make the class feel inaccessible to someone who might learn just as well taking in and pondering the material more slowly over time. 

Here are some more thoughts...

Last we counted: There are 82 hours and 41 minutes of pre-recorded material and approximately 32-36 hours of live Zoom meetings to participate in. All the Zoom meetings are recorded for replay.  You will have access to the course for 5 years starting at the end of the course. In addition to this, there are hand-outs and PDF's for each of the 8 modules.  Time spent reading, taking notes, journaling, studying, cross referencing. etc... is hard for me to estimate because everyone reads or studies differently.  In addition to the course written material, which can be downloaded and printed (yours to keep forever) there are a lot of recommended books and videos along the way.  These are optional of course.

I figure one good way to offer some answers your question would be to openly ask past students what they did, and these are some replies I got:

"I listened to everything I could twice and filled in my notes more the second time around and then I used my books to look up herbs and read about them more. I also used the human anatomy book to beef up on that. I probably spent 4 hours a week on average exploring."

"I would say that it can vary depending on your learning style, what your goals are, and what you consider studying. I don't feel like I "studied" much at all, but I've spent time putting your lessons into practice for years."

"I tried to watch all the videos (taking notes) before the classes met. This took several hours a week, and I had to do it in batches because I can only sustain that type of attention for so long at a stretch! Then the synchronous classes served mostly as a recap of the videos, plus some extra info as questions came up. I didn't read the handouts closely, because they were largely the same material (it's me, jim, inserting a comment here: the handouts actually do flesh out some material more or differently, so I suggest also reading them!).  I basically keep those in reserve for reference, since it's nice to be able to search the text."

"I did pretty much the same things as [the above post]. I watched all the videos (a couple each day till the online class) and nature walk videos before the online class. That makes it so you know what is being talked about and I had my questions ready to go that pertained to the previous videos for the online class. Other than that, I still watch the videos even though I’ve completed the full course. I’ve watched each of them numerous times while I work out almost everyday… …but the real way I learn best is when I actually need to put the practice to use. Jim’s pdf’s and videos have come in really handy"

"My not-so-satisfying answer is that herbalism is something to be integrated into one's life and not necessarily something to "go do" for a certain amount of time. I feel the same way about learning in general, but the field of herbalism is a bit more practical example. Integrate the art of the study into your food, your hobbies, your home and hygiene practices, your own health and wellness, and so on. Once you do it becomes something that you practice constantly and not just put on the schedule to be another task to check off the list. Idk how helpful that is, because I totally understand what you're trying to do when people ask the question.  Nonetheless, I think it's one of those questions that needs reframed rather than answered with a number..."  

"I think, to some extent, it depends upon your prior study and your learning style. I had already taken several of your classes so I was familiar and comfortable with the rhythm of your instruction and I had a basic foundation to build on. In general I think I remember reading a book chapter and a couple articles (or maybe a video) for each weekend of class. I took in what I could take in and didn’t do a lot of extra looking things up.  But I caught the bug and kept going. So my short answer would be “a couple hours a month and the rest of your life.”

Yes, schedules are hard things to work around, and we know that choosing any consistent day can’t work out for all who might be interested.

Here’s some of the ways we work with and around that:

• All discussion classes do get recorded.  We take the time to edit the recording to do things like improve video and audio quality over what the zoom recording is, add some captions if some of the questions are unclear because of people’s connections, and add “chapters” based on what the questions asked are, so it’s easier to find something than having to go through hours of one long recording.  In addition to this, we do offer previous lindera students the opportunity to participate again in the Zoom discussions the following year for a discounted price, which also increases your access to the course for another year.

• If someone can’t make a discussion session, they can send us some questions in advance and we’ll do our absolute best to address them during the discussion session so they can watch them on the recording.

• If a question can't fit in, there’s also an online discussion group that I answer stuff in.  Sometimes, if I want to include links or citations or specific quotes, I’ll use this instead of or in addition to answering them during the discussion meeting.