Unloaded Courses

I actually have more students in an unloaded course than I do in a course I'm loaded for.

Because of a colleague's sabbatical, I will be teaching a couple of courses he normally does and one of the courses I teach will not be offered this year. Except that students really want to take it. So we are offering the course as directed study, which means the students will be doing a do-it-yourself course with supposed little input from me. There will be no lectures...only the lab portion will be offered. A member of the department who has experience, but is not credentialed will be supervising the lab section of the course. I would like to turn over the organization of the course to him, but he is nervous about how that looks for our accreditation. He has done a lot of organization, but apparently I still need to amend the syllabus, and write online exams, and hold an organizational meeting, and I guess show up every once in a while to make sure it is all ok. For this I have no benefit (beside the pure pleasure of seeing the students learn, and learning more myself). It is over and above a heavy teaching load otherwise. There are 5 student signed up. Ironically, I have a course (for which I am loaded) that has only 3 enrolled.