Moving
I am not giving up on blogging, but I am giving up on Blogger.
I have moved the site, in its entirety to here: http://burntoutadjunct.wordpress.com/
If you with to continue with my snarkiness, see me there.
This blog has moved to burntoutadjunct.wordpress.com. Submit your comments and responses there.
Hello,
I ran across your blogspot in an effort to discover colleges that I might apply
to (to teach online). I JUST received my Master's in Elementary Ed. so I don't
have very many options...as far as being qualified for teaching very much. I
just wondered if you have any suggestions about where I could use my Master's
to teach online? I have applied to Phoenix and am awaiting the next phase. They
requested a whole packet of info, which I turned in...I am looking for more
places to teach at, as I NEED the money desperately! And I have three small
kids, so it's ideal for me not to have to leave home...
Anyway, you are welcome to put this question on your blog, I just didn't want to
take the time to set up a google account...so here I am.
thanks so much!
Sincerely,
~desperate for extra money :)
This is a very trick question. Where to teach online has a lot to do with factors that you will have no control over: enrollment, fluctuations and moods of out-of-sight deans, etc.
I would first begin asking, aside from the outright desperation, what sort of requirements you would be willing to fill. You sound, just by the note above, to be willing to accept just about anything. That will be fine for now, but watch out...the online faculty as pushed in ways onground are not.
For instance, you will be asked to respond, in decent length and detail, to each and every posting, question or e-mail from your students. Not too bad if you have 1-3 sections, but it can get burdensome fast, especially once weekly grading kicks in. UofP is especially stringent about you answering questions in length (think 10 lines or so) to each student posting. You are expected to share a lot of yourself, your experience and your thoughts. If you can type quickly, you will be ahead of the game, but factor in at least an hour per day in answering each section. I didn't make that cut for them.
Other schools will depend on their respective calls for Ed teachers. My experience is in Comp, so I don't know if I can recommend. I know that Capella prefers only PhDs. Baker College out of MI might be a place to look. Kaplan is another, although I don't know their Ed offerings.
Staying home and grading is a great boon, but don't underestimate the time required. I feel, especially in the accelerated sections (UofP were 5 weeks long), you will be expected to put in a large amount of "face" time online.
Hope this little bit helps.
InsideHigherEd today offers a story about the Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative, which seeks an “understanding [of] how students perceive university research.” One of the expressed goals, as stated by Cornell professor Kathy Lee Berggren, is “to ‘really learn how to use a library whether they’re in it or not.’”
Cornell’s summer seminar seeks to build on the work from Berkeley who, undergoing an accreditation review, sought to understand how to incorporate research skills into the course level of instruction. That is, instead of requiring a specific research course,
What Berkeley and Cornell are both wrestling with is the complication of performing research in an iPod age. The players as I see them: “digital native” students, cranky, if well-meaning professors, Google and brick-n-mortar libraries. Oh yea, and Steve Jobs.
First, the natives. Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago. These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek. And, with aggregated search engines like Yahoo! and Google, they are, to a large extent, able to accomplish this. Want to know the background of the Boston Tea Party? Want to see dissenting opinions? Conspiracy theories? The YouTube parody? Incoming freshmen can provide, usually while listening to downloaded music streaming from a video-enabled iPod (or, if you teach at ACU, all accessed on their school-provided iPhone). Research is done dude!
The cranky, if well-meaning professors, once confronted with such a bibliography, stare at the creatures seated in front of them and wonder, probably correctly, if these poor deluded punks have ever set foot in the hallowed halls of the school library. They haven’t. In their minds, they do not need to. Wake up old man, all of the information is now available online. If you want “deep” research, go to Google Scholar. There are all sorts of articles and things like that—even whole books now.
And expectations clash.
Libraries have done wonders in cataloging, compiling and generally making information accessible. I have no beef with them. They are, with a few notable exceptions, often lone wolfs, wandering the information plains with little support, scratched-together technology, and low budgets. They yearn for the students to come on in and use the catalogs so painstakingly compiled, the databases built from competing platforms. They even have an online portal offered up for dorm access. They have built it…they will come.
A user is able to access a vast catalog of downloaded/ripped songs by using only one fingers—usually the thumb. By spinning the wheel, even a novice user can quickly find the song/podcast lecture she is seeking within a few seconds, even from a list of thousands. Form meets function, and the case is cool and sleek and it works and the information becomes subordinate to the users. The thumb is in charge, and the streaming sounds confirm that, at least here, the world works, as it should. Steve Jobs has provided the user with a user experience that confirms, at least for most, the promises of the web hype—the tool from the bubble.
What the Natives don’t get, and the Profs know, is that the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume. That is, there are some big holes in that Net. The Libraries have worked to fills these gaps (consortiums, partnerships, etc.), but their work doesn’t always get the notice or exposure. Here is where the fault lines of generational expectations come into stark relief: Profs expect students to march into the library and acquaint themselves with the subject’s/discipline’s fiefdom. If not, then the student is lazy and lacks the necessary drive or will. The Natives don’t expect to have to navigate fiefdoms. For them, at least thus far, knowledge and data have been without borders. It does not occur to them that there would be a specific database for articles about Colonial literature that is not accessible through a quick key-word search from their dorm.
So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.
Labels: classroom tools, education, higher education, teaching, teaching methods, technology, technology in learning
Labels: academic freedom, adjunct, blogging, education, higher education, teaching
Labels: efflufia, facts, flotsom and jetsom, weird but true
Labels: BlackBoard, classroom tools, education, higher education, online teaching, social networks, teaching methods, technology in learning
In my poverty-stricken adjunct days, I would have jumped at the chance to present at a national conference about a tool whose use I employed for the 12 odd years I taught. I would have jumped to present the limitations of the tools (which there are) in order to present the context of its use (as an automated policing tool). Why, because I was poor, the tool worked, and it freed up my time. Plus, there are little opportunities for an adjunct to play on the big stage.
Would it have been like "win a free trip to SF?" You betcha, but not just to see the Golden Gate, but, again, to play on the larger professional stage.
I second making the payment public (I would be one of those whose initial submission may or may not be what is actually presented--tickets, once purchased, cannot be taken back). CCCC needs to enter the adult world where financial interests compete with scholarship (medicine has been doing it for years). Monitor, yes. Disclose, yes. Allow for a range of voices that may not have been heard, yes.
Worst case, you walk out of a commercial posing as a paper. Best case, you hear from that small town CC whose adjunct has something interesting to say.
I have taught as an adjunct in both an online in class instructor. Obviously, I'm not rolling in the cash from it. So imagine my surprise when I talked to a guy who is the head of a major corporation in the city where I live. He talked about a 6-figure supplement he was making from teaching online. I was really suspicious, calculating that he would have to teach about 60 classes a year (in addition to a full-time job and family) to make that kind of money. I mentioned my confusion and he said that over time he has found the highest paying online universities that have "not overwhelming" time commitments and he's done it that way. Do you think it's possible?The short answer is: he is full of Bush. That is, no way he is earning six figures adjuncting online. I went into the salary breakdown in some detail less than a year ago, and I think the numbers there still stand.
Labels: adjunct, education, higher education, online teaching, technology in learning