The formula
hours = credits × hours per credit
Where it comes from
An ECTS credit does not measure class hours, it measures student workload: lectures, private study, coursework and exams. The equivalence runs from 25 to 30 hours and each country sets its own within that range, so it is a field and not a constant.
How to work it out by hand
- Multiply the credits by what one is worth in your country
- Divide by the weeks in the period for the weekly hours
- Of those hours, around 40 % are usually contact hours
- The rest is work on your own
What is worth knowing
The figure that surprises everyone is the same one: a full year of full-time study is 1,500 hours, which is a working year. When someone says they "only have twenty hours of class a week" they are counting the small part. This also works backwards: a 6-credit module is 150 hours, and if the semester runs fifteen weeks that is ten hours a week on that module alone.