How to schedule homework? Many times topics in courses are week-aligned, i.e., topic1 is studied on week1 (say in lecture1 on Monday/Wednesday and then in TA-section-1 on Friday), then topic 2 is studied on week2, etc.

Say the semester is 10 weeks long, and that there are 5 homework assignment (1st assignment covers topic1 and topic2, etc.)

I wonder what is the best strategy to schedule homework assignments, given that deadlines should be (at least) 2 weeks after publishing a new set of homework.

I see several options:

Option 1.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week2, with deadline at the end of week 4.
[generaly, publish HW No. i on week 2i with deadline on week 2i+2]

Pros: An assignment is published only after the students saw all the relevant materials and have full two weeks to work on it.
Cons: Students usually work towards the deadline. Then, they actually work on the assignment only towards the end of week4, when topic1+2 are already stale in their minds.
(Another issue, of secondary importance, is that the last HW may interfere with finals.)

Option 2.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week 1 with deadline at the end of week 3.
[generally, publish HW No. i on week 2i-1 with deadline on week 2i+1]

Pros: The students exercise topic1+2 immediately after seeing it.
Cons: They have only 1 week to do the assignment; Students that try to start the assignment early may get confused since some of the material haven't been covered yet in the lecture.

Option 3.
Care less, do whatever.

  

Would love to hear your advice.
It's indeed an interesting question that I have wondered about myself a few times. In my case it is even worse because I am currently teaching a course that has lectures twice a week, so the scheduling gets even more annoying.

I am not sure if there is a silver bullet. My default nowadays is Option 2 - I publish homework before all relevant topics have been covered in class, just because otherwise it feels like the homework is ages behind the lecture. Another problem of your Option 1 is that the last in-class topics basically cannot be covered by homework at all. With Option 2 you only have like one class that can't be part of the homework anymore.

Of course, the ideal schedule in my opinion is Option 3 - publish all homework at the beginning of class and give students agency over how they schedule their own work. If you worry that students get confused because they don't know whether they should already be able to solve a given assignment, you can always note which lectures it refers to.