At my college we have made a fortune offering a wide variety of summer courses through a number of different schedules: 12 week, 10 week, 8 week, even 4 week. Nights, weekends only, etc.We always get these warnings: Be sure to teach the full course! Make it challenging. Make it worthy of our regular semester courses.
And of course they're not. I'm in a 4 week class right now. We meet every day. But the students don't have the out of class time necessary to do what I normally do. They need reading time, thinking time, writing time. They don't need the hours sitting in class with me saying, "Well, did anyone do the reading?"
I can't do my best for them in 4, 6, or 10 weeks.
Q: Can summer session courses work? What's the minimum amount of time you need to really teach a course that meets the standards of a traditional course?
The key issue, in my opinion, is this: "They need reading time, thinking time, writing time." And, I would add, you need time to read and comment on their work (and, of course, grade it, but grading isn't the time-consuming part).
ReplyDeleteThe scheduling of summer courses strikes me as very good evidence that many college administrators think of college classes much as the general public, and too many students, do: they assume that they main work of the class takes place during, not outside, class hours. As you point out, the opposite is true. So no, we can't deliver the same class in a shortened period, even if the in-class hours are the same. If nothing else, human beings consolidate knowledge, skills, etc. while they sleep, and students in a foreshortened class have fewer nights' sleep available to accomplish that work.
That said, I think we can deliver solid, if not identical, classes. I attack the problem at both ends: I try to pare down the number of separate assignments and activities, making each do double and triple duty wherever possible, *and* I warn students early and often that they need to come as close as possible to setting aside the standard 2-3 hours' homework time for every hour in the classroom (my recent summer classes have been online, so I actually tell them that they have to set aside both class time and preparation time, but they'll save on commuting time). Then I plunge straight it, with substantial work due very soon, and encourage those who are falling behind to make use of the various drop/withdrawal options available. In my latest class, that meant that almost 1/3 of the original enrollees fell by the wayside, but the 2/3 that remained did unusually well, producing one quite rigorous and substantial text, and a couple of worthwhile, if somewhat less demanding, related texts. In terms of skill development (which is what the class is about), I think I covered the ground pretty well, though with perhaps a bit less repetition/reinforcement than I would in the regular term.
It probably helps that I'm teaching an online writing class, where the main activity is actually producing and revising texts (it's hard for students to fool themselves that if they're making it to class but nothing else, they must be "taking" the class). A reading-heavy face-to-face class would present different challenges, and require different solutions (probably some combination of frequent quizzes -- a tactic I hate, but which may be necessary in this case -- and planning to focus class discussion on specific passages which can be "close read" -- which in some cases will mean "read for the first time" -- in class).
My opinion may also be skewed by the fact that summer teaching is an economic necessity for me at this point, but I really, really want to have some summer left over, for research and writing *and* for recreation, after I finish the summer class (in other words, I don't want to teach a 10- or 12- or even 7-week term, even though those options might be more pedagogically sound). So I'm not exactly an unbiased judge.
If a 4-week summer course is bad, then perhaps a 104-week or 156-week course would be best. Or 208 weeks. Perhaps we should start all freshman on 35 four-year courses. That would teach them real-world multi-tasking skills, and they would finish all of the courses at the same time, just in time to graduate.
ReplyDeleteSouthern Bubba has an interesting idea, but the trend is going in a different direction. If I look at current trends and extrapolate into the future, my grandchildren will take 35 three-hour classes all at once. I don't mean three credit hour classes. I mean three hours - total. For the whole class. The university of the future will allow you to graduate the afternoon of the day you enroll, provided you enroll early enough in the morning to have time for a three hour class before graduation in the afternoon. Since all the classes are online, you can take them all at once. The university will admonish its faculty to make these three hour classes "just as rigorous and edjukayshunl" as the traditional classes which will, by then, refer back to the 4- or 8-week courses of bygone days and the one-week classes of recent times and the one-day classes of the previous term. But at the same time, the university will be checking to make sure that the three-hour classes comply with all the guidelines. The guidelines will have all kinds of bean-counting requirements for the faculty, a handful of bean-counting measures for the students, and vague wording about learning critical thinking, teaching skills relevant to student lives, preparing students for the future etc. Any course offering that is simply not possible in the three hour period will of course not be acceptable. Students will go to the university that offers the most "flexible" schedule. Perhaps that will mean that the three hours can be _any_ three hours over the course of a given day, for example - with instructor feedback at various times during those three hours. Readings will be downloaded at the start of class and grades will be due 15 minutes after class ends.
ReplyDeleteI once taught the same writing class over a 15-week semester and a 6-week summer semester in the same school year. As an instructor, I preferred the summer course because:
ReplyDelete1- I could arrange access to a small computer lab and make them type/write in class. This allowed me to see what they were doing and force them to get started on the term paper.
2- The semester course was too long for the simple reason that they goofed off too much and didn't take the short scaffolding/prep assignments seriously (arrogantly thinking the final paper would end up right in the end -- NOT).
3- I simply couldn't come up with enough to do in the classroom in 45 minutes that would be meaningful. Lecturing fell flat, usually because they refused to connect the 3 weekly mini-lectures with the take-home assignment due the following week. Things worked better during the summer when I taught the full lesson then made them start the assignment in class (and sometimes finish it there too).
The major problem: "Summer classes are SUPPOSED to be easy!!!!!!!!" Too many of them didn't spend ANY time doing their research (I suspect waiting until the last minute...just like in the semester-long class but worse).
In the semester-long class, the students had many assignments to average in, but with the summer class the grade rested a bit more heavily on the final paper (which was the point of the course to begin with). It's just mind-numbing for me when I teach citation and plagiarism avoidance one week, have a very drafty draft the following week and too many students don't cite a damn thing. And then they don't do it for the rough draft due the following week...nor the final version due on the last day. Easy F, but then the whining ensues ("I need this course to graduate!" and "I need this course for my major at University X across state!" and "I paid a lot of money for this class and I can't have an F!" et al.)
And don't get me started on their inability to follow a style manual. Some nail it immediately, but again too many seem to have never looked over it at all and just make up their own rules. Why did I even bother bother making them a "cheat sheet"?!?!?! If this is a problem in any "normal" course, it's mind-boggling for a short course -- There's no time to "forget"! (or lose the book/cheat sheet/etc.)
I'll second what CC said above. It is possible (and indeed, summer students seem -on the whole- more motivated) to have a pedagogically rigorous class that works.
ReplyDeleteI have taught lit courses in 8 week and 6 week formats. Students actually didn't like the 6 week format--they felt rushed, as did I; even with only 14 students' work to grade, it was a challenge (particularly as I did not have, because I could not afford, summer daycare).
I feel like 8 weeks is the bare minimum for competence in a composition course. As CC pointed out, students need time to process and practice what we're trying to teach them. Our system has experimented with a 3 week winterim session (once) but will not be repeating it. The professor who taught it is one of our superstars, and did not feel as though the students got what they needed. If they couldn't get it from the superstar, the rest of us haven't a hope in hell.
Sadly, our system has been doing "accelerated blended" courses during the regular semester. So far I have refused to jump on that particular over-load wagon--because while you're teaching an 8-week accelerated course, you're also teaching 3 15-week courses. Every one of my colleagues who has done this has complained about it. And since it doesn't come with extra pay, forget it. I'm a team player, but I'm done doing a shite-load of extra work for nothing. Of course, since this is the way the trend is moving, I may be out of a job...but if things really do end up as Bubba suggests, I won't be too broken up about losing a McDiploma job anyway.
I teach comp. in 10 weeks in summer term, and it's fine. The classes are 125 minutes each, 2x a week, which is brutally long and boring, but it's over in just over 2 months. No big deal. I've taught them many times.
ReplyDeleteThe students, on the other hand, are sometimes better than spring/fall students, since they're giving up a lot of play time to attend class. There are others, however, who think summer classes ARE play time, and they crash and burn fast, as they deserve to. If they want to play, they can go elsewhere.
I've taught two 6-week courses, and one 3-week (5 days a week) course. Of course I covered the same material as in a regular semester. Anything else would be cheating them out of the education they paid for. After all, I actually had more aggregate class time in the Summer courses than I would have during a semester.
ReplyDeleteAs for the students' mistaken notion that Summer courses are supposed to be easier: I make it very clear during the first few meetings that we cover a whole semester's worth of material, that Summer courses are damn fast, and that if they fall even one day behind, they will likely fail. Heck, I even go so far as to say, "Man, I wouldn't have taken a 3 or 6 week course when I was in college. This is fast!" But it's exactly what they signed up for, so that's that.
One additional nice thing about summer courses is that students aren't taking as heavy a load. In fact, my class might be the only class they have to worry about. So if I give them two hours' worth of reading to finish by tomorrow, I've actually found that MORE of them will do it, since they've got more time to concentrate on this particular class.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it's hard to teach an "identical" class to the ones during the semester--there's just not enough time. I can mimic the rigor, but a writing class with four major papers just isn't the same as a writing class with one major paper and two tiny ones.
Yet for some reason, my university used to pay about the same (small) amount to teach a summer class as they did to teach a semester class. Which is why I taught summer classes.
Our summer classes come in several flavors also: three-week, four-week, eight-week, and ten-week sessions. The four-week is the most popular. My concern, at least in CC Land, is that our students don't truly understand what they're getting into when they sign up for these sessions. I do eight-week sessions often during the school year. I tell them up front this is like taking two courses at once and they should expect the workload to be commiserate. I still end up with whiners who claim they read more in my class than Sonny Snowflake did in his 16-week session and that there's no time to process what they read.
ReplyDeleteI think compressed courses can work if the students are properly motivated and have the time management skills to do the job well. I took two four-week courses along with my regular schedule and a 15-hour job during my SLAC days and made it work, but I did this only with courses in my major so that I knew I had the skills to pull it off. I can't even count the number of students who end up in these accelerated sessions yet are retaking the course for the third or even fourth time after having dropped and/or failed it.