The academic credit hour, developed over 100 years ago, does not accommodate online and other instructional innovations. The academic credit hour is an Industrial Age metric based on seat-time, or contact time that faculty and students spend together in a classroom. Online education does not require that students and faculty be in the same place for teaching and learning to occur, and it does not necessarily fit a fifteen-week semester model. Instead of requiring that online educators articulate the equivalence of their model with the traditional model, a new framework based on level of student effort is proposed that will free faculty and instructional designers to be more innovative. As academic currency, the academic credit hour represents some level of engagement by students. It is not a measure of what they have learned or the academic quality of the educational experience in which they participated. To reframe the academic credit hour, the author proposes making "level of student effort" the foundation of the definition. If a one-credit course is designed to engage students for forty hours, a three-credit course is designed to engage students with the course content and outcomes for approximately 120 to 130 hours. Faculty can use their experience to estimate the time and effort needed by the typical student to engage successfully in each of the learning activities in a particular field, course, and program. Faculty and course designers can determine how and to what degree students will engage with the course content, through resources, projects, laboratory experiences, dialogue other students, etc., and the size of these activities in terms of expected student effort. Within clear parameters faculty and course designers have freedom to innovate in the facilitation of learning.