I'm going to be out on medical leave for the first 6 weeks of next semester due to some major surgery.I am fretting over the fact that someone higher up might find out from the person covering one of my online courses that at this point, it pretty much teaches itself - other than reviewing their labs which are pass/fail (so I can grade them basically with a quick scan), the review assignments and tests are all automatically graded, and I've put enough extra help options online that the most I've needed to do in several years is direct students to a resource that I've already posted and offer to meet with or talk to them - which they very rarely need to do.
Aside from getting the course set up in Blackboard each semester (1 hour if the book is the same, more if the book's been updated which actually happens only every 2-3 years) I probably spend at most an hour a week on this class, and it's a 5-contact hour course.
In the humanities, it will be a while before we can approach this level of automation. But it will happen. This is exactly what a certain group of people want to happen. Then anyone who has taken the course can teach (read "facilitate") it. Then being an adjunct won't even require a BA degree. Or some MA or PhD can be kept as the "teacher" to attract students, but there will be several thousand in the class. 10 years after that it is completely automated.
ReplyDeleteI'm truly sorry about your health issue.
ReplyDeleteIt's seems that the actual secret you don't want to get out is that you don't teach. Online instruction doesn't mean being an automaton. I suspect if you taught F2F, you'd be one of those reading from the same lecture notes every freakin' year.
Sorry, this really pisses me off. I'd fire you if you taught for me. I have one on line instructor, and she live chats and Skypes with students every week. She gives students the same hours of attention they'd get if it was a F2F class. Her classes are rigorous, and at the end of each term we conference about what works, what doesn't, and she makes revisions.
A class is a living thing that requires care and feeding, every time it's taught. You are ripping off the school and your students.
I wish you all the best with your health issues.
What Annie Oakley said.
ReplyDeleteI get really pissed off at my "colleagues" who say that teaching online courses is more difficult and time-consuming than teaching f2f classes--and then admit that they're teaching a full load (or even a double load) of online classes.
If online classes are more demanding, then why would anyone in his right mind insist on teaching them?
Granny Geek just answered my question--and we all knew what the answer was anyway, didn't we?
And I'd be willing to bet that there are several faculty members on my campus--oh, wait, they're not on campus, are they?--who are paying someone else to "teach" for them.
Distance education folks need to realize that if work can be outsourced, it will be outsorced. There are thousands of people in India who are just as well-educated as we are, who speak and write English as well as we do, who are willing to get up at two in the morning to teach across time zones, and who will do it for a tenth of what we're paid--in rupees.
Hey everybody, be nice to Grandma.
ReplyDeleteGG, your class ran so smoothly because of the excellent work you did prior to the Christmas break. You were a conscientious colleague who went the extra mile to make sure that the substitute didn't get overwhelmed by the work load.
If your dean continues to ask questions, say that yes, you did automate your course and you can do it for other people's courses too. You can be the school's online course master facilitator and save the school a million bucks.
Absolutely automate in order to be able to spend more time with students one-on-one or in groups. But not to eliminate the FIVE CONTACT HOURS you are supposed to be spending with students every week.
ReplyDeleteOh hell. Let's just create a degree program based on the old reading primers. Go through the workbooks, take an automatically graded quiz, move to the next level. Send in 25 box tops for your BA, and another 15 will get you your MA and a magic decoder ring that will give you the answers for your PhD.
Dear Granny:
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear of your health issues.
Sincerely, BC
Now: I'm not going to issue the smackdown, which has already been elegantly stated by both Annie and Philip, above.
I just want to ask: If you're only spending "at most an hour a week on this class" why do you need six weeks off? If you're teaching 12 credits, at most, you're spending two and a half hours a week working...which, like Annie and Philip above, I find highly unsettling.
I have a colleague who teaches F2F who, due to the nature of her courses (they are very specifically designed and a sub would have to be both an expert futurist and have a background in Existentialist Basket Weaving and Modern art) did not take maternity leave; she simply converted the first four weeks of her classes to an online format while she stayed home with her new baby. She definitely spent more than two and a half hours supervising online discussions, answering student questions, and grading online assignments, though, so I'm sure you can guess she's in the humanities, not exactly a field that lends itself well to automation (right now, anyway). Though I guess instead of having the students write papers, she could have just put together multiple choice tests like the ones they have in high school humanities courses...
I do see the future to which AdjunctSlave is referring. I wonder how much longer the humanities will survive the shift--my guess is not much.
And don't forget this, from the Op-Ed pages of Monday's New York Times: "Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/daphne-koller-technology-as-a-passport-to-personalized-education.html?src=recg&pagewanted=print
As someone who teaches both online and face to face, I'd like to suggest that it is not quite so simple.
ReplyDeleteIf you were to eliminate my lecturing from my state university adjunct position, I would drop about 15 hours of work from my weekly rotation. Replace the newly-written/researched and delivered lecture with a pre-recorded video or selection of readings, and I end up with 3 or 4 hours' work each week checking in with students and grading.
Most of the "checking in" that I do would be destroyed on this website in the comments section. Example: I go through my grades every other week and contact students who have stopped coming to class, etc. If I refrained from doing that, my workload in my F2F course -- minus my lecturing -- would be about 90 to 180 minutes a week. Bare minimum minus lectures. And that's what an online course basically is.
S, compare that to my online job. Lectures pre-recorded, assigned reading already loaded, and my job is to maintain a presence in each discussion forum -- without answering every post, since that would be to "dominate" and not merely "maintain presence" -- and then I email my students from time to time. If I were pressed for time, I could do that in about 60 minutes a week. Because of the type of person I am, I post extra materials on studying, hold extra forums on other related topics, and try to foster a community anyway.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not as bad as one might think. If you stopped having to do lecture, your work would be equal to a grader. And that's basically what most online teaching is.
I'm somewhat in the middle on this. Like Ben, I suspect that Granny's class runs smoothly because she put a lot of work into designing it well in the first place. I also suspect that she can grade exercises so quickly because she designed them and has read many responses to them (and probably done some tweaking of directions in response) over time. It will probably actually take a substitute more time. And I'm sure it takes Granny more time in a semester when she updates the class (and I hope/expect she does so often; while I'm never going to cut my work down to a few hours a week, I certainly have semesters when things take more or less time, mostly because I have or haven't changed something). Still, if the whole class (and not just the first month or so) consists of such work, I wonder whether it's challenging enough to be a college class.
ReplyDeleteAlso, while I believe that we may to some degree be able to automate the components of humanities classes that are concerned with absorbing information (what happened when in history or a piece of literature; what terms scholars use to describe various events, artforms, etc.; what some of the current historical/critical stories we tell with/about such facts or artworks are), I don't see any way to automate practicing the skills that will allow students to produce their own original work. That takes practice with challenging problems, including some to which students can't find "right answers" no matter how much they search the internet (which means we have to keep coming up with new material), and which can't be scored by a machine. Students need to be given tasks which challenge them to the degree that they respond idiosyncratically, and it takes human teachers to look at such responses, possibly talk to the student, and try to figure out what's going on with the student's thinking, and push him/her one additional step in the direction of comprehension and mastery. Some very bright students, of course, can do much of this on their own, but that was true when we were learning from books alone (or, for that matter, from stone tablets or griots). Those aren't the students most of us have, or the ones for which we should plan.
Granny, I hope your surgery goes well, and that you return to work ready to redesign the class so that it's more challenging, for your students and thus for you. It sounds like on some level you know there's a problem. This probably isn't the semester to fix it, but it does need to be fixed.
Whoa. Well, I really didn't expect this kind of smackdown but if I distance myself from it I can understand why -- there is a lot that I didn't say that does make a big difference in how it's perceived.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I've been teaching this class for 12 years, first in the classroom and now online, and in that time have collected a huge variety of learning resources that I have always made available to my students, even when I taught this course in the classroom. For every topic covered I have some variety of additional explanations that I've created, practice exercises, demontration videos that I've both created and found online, links to articles that help put what they're learning in context and let them see how it's applied, etc. The labs I tweak every year as I see where students are making errors or not fully understanding the context of how they might apply this knowledge in the real world. I got a complement today in fact, from a former graduate who took this class from me in 2001 who is now a graduate and on our advisory committee (he was in to see the final presentations done by the students in another one of my classes) who said that he still uses one of the cheat sheets that I created to help them understand one particular confusing subject.
Not to defend myself per se but to just put out a fact: I am the absolute furthest person in the world from that type of instructor that clearly many of us loath, who gets a book, uses the materials and tests right out of the book, and calls it a day. Most of what I teach is performance-based technologies, and yet anyone who teaches those courses knows that textbooks ship with really crappy objective tests that test how well students memorize trivia without having any real-world understanding of its context or application. I have a reputation for requiring students to work harder than they have to work in anyone else's classes (including in this course) but it's because I challenge them to really understand the material - and again, as a technology instructor in a two year program, this means that they have to understand how it's applied in the real working world that they hope to enter.
Part of the time that I spend in this class is that at least once a week, I post links to updated information that relates to this course, and I repeatedly urge students to contact me for any help they need understanding the material, completing the labs, etc. But it's a very geeky-techy course -- there's really very little that lends itself to discussion, and the students don't have the background to discuss how this applis in their own lives and jobs becuase they haven't applied it there -- yet. The labs are the core of the class, requiring them to do research, demonstrate that they know how to apply what they've learned, that they understand what would be the proper response to a problem or need, etc.
I also realize that I should put the amount of time I need to put into at this point into context in terms of the number of students -- typically this class has only 10-12 students. I'm not spending an hour reviewing 50 students labs, I'm spending an hour reviewing 10 students labs, and the material is familiar enough to me at this point that I'm able to pick out issues very easily and point them to what they need to know to better understand the material with very little effort. Some students need nothing more than a comment of "fantastic work!" or "remember this for the certification exame" but even those who need more extensive help need only a paragraph or two (frequently pointing them to more extensive resources) to explain what they need to know. The ONLY thing that is "automated" are the grades for their review questions and objective tests, which again, I've spent 12 years refining and updating, and in which every question requires them to demonstrate not just that they can look up that the number of widgets in a whatzit is 12, but that they understand when and why they'd need to count the number of widgets in a whatzit, or the significance of the number being too low or too high, etc.
ReplyDeleteDo some of you actually get to teach only 12 credits? We are required to teach 18 contact hours (which may be only 14-15 credits but with extra contact hours for labs), plus I normally (when not facing major surgery, that is!) teach two extra classes because community college life may be good in many ways but when you're raising two grandkids, it nice to have that extra to pay the bills, so typically I'm teaching 25-28 contact hours a week.
One last comment -- this is also a situation where experience certainly helps. For example, I see an English teacher colleague/friend grading papers and she does it faster than I can imagine possible, because I'm an engineer/geek who might have some skill with writing but I'm not going to automatically see where certain slight errors are made. My friend who teaches Spanish? I couldn't review/grade the assignments in that class in a zillion years. Someone new to teaching this class, who does not have my six years of education related to this technology, 18 years of professional experience applying this technology, and 12 years experience teaching this technology, would likely take much longer to review the work that takes me only moments to determine if someone gets it or doesn't get it -- and believe me, the labs and exercises I have them do are designed first to lead them towards what they need to know and experience to get it, then evaluate whether or not they really do get it.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I'm rambling on, after way too many glasses of iced tea with dinner, I'll add in one more thing: I met today with the instructor who will be covering for another of my online classes, and it was clear that she was a little taken aback by how much work will be required to cover that particular class. It's on a subject that I could automate if I didn't want to bother wanting to make sure that students really understood what they were doing (it's in an applied technology), using one of the tools tha the textbook publishers are pushing on us so that we can have students walk through simulations that verify if they clicked or typed the right thing but don't give us any way to see if the students really understood what they were doing. But this class can't be taught this way AND BE TAUGHT RIGHT. So instead, every week all 15-20 students (since this class has a broader base of students taking it) will be submitting work to be reviewed once, twice, sometimes three or more times, until they acutally understand it and do it right based on my feedback and the answers I give to the questions that they have.
ReplyDeleteIt's just almost funny -- I'm honestly not offended or feeling defensive, but I'm just so used to being known as the instructor who kicks lazy students butts to the ground hard and shows no mercy to students who just can't be bothered, who pushes my students to do more work than they do in any other class (especially when it comes to actually engaging their brains instead of just sliding by on their technical aptitude), and who will do whatever it takes to help a student who is struggling to understand the material (even if its an online student who I need to call at 10pm on a Saturday, or who needs to come in after their job ends at 6, when so many other instructors basically say "here's my office hours, deal with it") that I just never imagined that I'd be interpreted any other way - though again, I would have probably assumed the same things.
I just read the article that BurntChrome posted, and I have no idea if it's going to get me slammed again but there is a lot in there that is a model for how I teach a lot of my classroom-based courses. In my mind there is nothing worse than an instructor droning away at the front of a classroom doing nothing but flipping through bad powerpoints provided by the textbook publisher and doing nothing but reading the chapter to students who aren't listening anyway. The model I use for a lot of my courses is that student have to read the chapter before we cover it in class, and they have to then complete review questions on them before they even come to class (they answer a random sample of 25 questions on the topic from a testbank of 100-150 questions, and if they don't pass they get a different 25 questions, until they get a passing score). This way when they come to class we can spend our time MUCH more prouctively: The time I spend in the front of the classroom is in explaining the concepts and aspects of the technology that are the most confusing to students, or putting the information in context of how they'll later apply it, or having a discussion about how they've used certain skills in their lives or what they think is more important to do as a professional, or doing a group problem solving exercise. Then once we've done that, students move on to labs, group exercises, or other things that are designed to help them apply what they've learned.
ReplyDeleteAutomated technology without question has its place in improving how we teach classes, if we use it for the right things and the right reasons. By automating the correct parts of the class, I can ensure that they've read the material, so that I can focus on helping make sure that they UNDERSTAND and know how to apply the material.
@Granny: it sounds like you are, indeed, benefiting from years of experience and preparation/tweaking of assignments, and like one particular class just happens to be at a relatively stable/smooth-working point. That's a good place to be for what promises to be a harder-than-usual semester.
ReplyDeleteIt also sounds like you're not trying to automate what can't be automated while maintaining quality, and like you're using class time wisely (answering students' questions -- at least the good ones -- has always struck me as a good use of class time, and an efficient way to teach, since often more than one student has the same question, and/or a stronger student comes up with a question that a weaker one hadn't even considered. Of course, it helps if they actually listen to each others' questions, which, at least in my class, isn't always the case).
And it sounds like should be okay. The fill-in for the first class will probably take longer than you do to do the work, and the fill-in for the second may even complain about the amount of work involved. So you probably don't have anything to worry about.
P.S. I have 12 contact hours, but, as a writing teacher, most of my work occurs outside the classroom. I'm not a quick grader (even with rubrics and autocorrect shortcuts for common comments in place), and, as I mentioned above, I'm deliberately asking my students (in a writing-in-the-disciplines class) to do things they haven't done before. As with your more advanced class, I spend a lot of time saying "not quite; try this" at various stages of the process. So it's quite possible to keep very busy, even with 12 hours. And if I had 9 (which is closer to what professional organizations in my field recommend), I'm pretty sure I'd keep equally busy, by assigning more work and commenting even more frequently on students' progress on larger projects. We all adjust what we do to fit our workloads, I think, while trying not to compromise quality. Automated technology can probably help a bit with that process, but, as your own examples show, it's hardly a substitute for hard work by teachers, both in the preparation and ongoing tweaking of course materials, and in interacting with and providing feedback to students. I'm pretty sure that unless and until the students are entirely automated, the teachers can't be either.
Thanks for clarifying things, GG. I don't think you need to be concerned--I suspect your sub will need much longer to complete the tasks you do. It sounds as though your use of technology makes it possible to give your students an enviable depth and quality. Your sub is lucky to have everything laid out so well.
ReplyDeleteI'm in a similar situation--I teach classes that add up to 3 credits for the students, but require 5 hours of contact time per week because of labs, so also have 18 -20 weeks of contact time. It's grueling.
What Annie said--thanks for clarifying. In my heart of hearts, I was hoping that the reason your classes were so well "automated" had more to do with the scenario that Contingent Cassandra pointed out.
ReplyDeleteI have many, many colleagues who teach online and F2F. In fact a number of people in my department have 50/50 appointments. I know that a lot goes into the design and execution of the course material. My worry is that once they can automate grading (or get away with outsourcing it to India), we will have just clever-ed ourselves out of our jobs.
FYI, I was going to sign up for the Stanford course on Intro to Artificial Intelligence offered online (because I'm fascinated by AI) but I don't have the science/math background sufficient to complete the coursework. Plus, 3/4 of my course load is comp, which is time-consuming to grade, so I didn't take it. Seemed like a neat idea, and I'm still subscribed to the course Twitter feed (FYI, there were A LOT of bugs, but I'm sure they're working them out.)