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The transition to Remote Instruction is SOOOO systematically difficult. A thread. 1/x
#AcademicChatter
#AcademicChatter
Even now, when all instructors in my dept say they’re loosening requirements, most students feel they are working harder. The faculty have busted their butts making the transition (lots of work) just to teach less content and lower their ‘standards’. 2/x
still barely past the transition, we have to think about how we will remediate this mess. How will students learn the basics they’ve missed? Boot camps, self-paced catch up courses, expanded tutoring. More work. 3/x
As we think about upcoming terms (our summer will be online), choose the courses best-suited for online, find instructors who are actually good at this, encourage them to design/adopt their courses. Lotsa work. 4/x
And at the same time, bad online teaching is actually super low effort. Record 15-20 lectures, post them up and set up a few self-grading multiple choice quizzes and homeworks. Very little work, especially once you’ve done it before. 5/x
By same token, as a student, there are also two paths. Very hard: do all assignments, participate in online groups, watch 40 ted talks, all in a living room filled with siblings and grandparents on a shared laptop. Way more work than regular class. 6/x
Or, there is also an easy path: do bare minimum, take a few online quizzes and listen to recorded lectures while playing xbox. The two sides don’t have to choose the same path. An industrious instructor can have lazy students and vice versa. 7/x
Add mass trauma, disruption, etc, and nobody should be blamed for taking an “easy” path. And there is NO incentives for instructors to do this well, beyond their own internal motivations. 8/x
Add unemployment, poor prospects for finding work, and you have a glut of adjunct instructors begging to teach online courses. Many of them will be majorly overbooked, teaching 6-8 online courses. 9/x
Evaluate all the teaching prospects: more work. And nobody is operating at their peak capabilities. Even with a ton of effort, students will have a diminished experience. It’s so maddening. This didn’t have to happen. end thread. #TrumpMassGraves #TrumpIsACompleteFailure
really. Fuck Trump.
