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description= History is more or less bunk. - Henry Ford, 25 May 1916.;
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k openly about other social and economic injustices refrain from allying themselves with those of us who are denied academic freedom by virtue of our identities as adjuncts asks lori harrison kahan in vitae how are we to explain this silence great questions but if you really want to make this point stick in the minds of most tenured and tenure track faculty i m not sure this line of argument is going to work instead i d explain how the adjunct problem really is every professor s problem drum dialectics into the heads of these mushroom upstarts and we ll all be better off together for this to happen it s essential to convince the people on the tenure track now that they aren t as special as they think they are the master at this line of argument is of course rebecca schuman unfortunately king cannibal rats on a festering ghost ship are unlikely to lend a hand until the moment they realize that it s time to swim to shore so now then is the time to point out that it might be time for all of us to paddle the burnt out hulk that we all occupy a little closer to shore than we are right now i ll let the numbers speak for themselves here s reason 55 from 100 reasons not to go to grad school in november 2010 the national science foundation reported that 49 562 people earned doctorates in the united states in 2009 this was the highest number ever recorded most of the increase over the previous decade occurred in the sciences and engineering but the nsf s report noted a particularly grim statistic for those who completed a phd in the humanities only 62 6 percent had a definite commitment for any kind of employment whatsoever remember that this is what faces those who have already survived programs with very high attrition rates more than half of those who start phd programs in the humanities do not complete them see reason 46 the phd has been cheapened by its ubiquity every one of those disposable academics in your field would gladly fill your tenure track job at substantially less pay than you re making right now and why shouldn t they you probably aren t doing very much to help them so why should they help you moreover plenty of administrators would gladly fire you and replace you with an adjunct if they thought they could get away with it what s that you say you write articles do you too bad only three people read half of all articles and most of those university press books we all write aren t exactly setting the world on fire either adjuncts and people fresh out of grad school can do the exact same things that existing tenured faculty can do they even have books published at the same university presses that you do they re also likely to perform all the functions that you perform for much much less money at the same time and you knew i was going to get to this at some point moocs or as these guys stress the technologies that enable moocs can do the same job you do rather badly for a lot less money in the long run therefore university bosses who couldn t care less about what books you ve published will replace you with pre recorded lectures and an interactive web site without blinking an eye anybody with a basic understanding of organized labor knows the solution to all these problems join together help the people willing to do your job for less get the opportunity to do the job you do with you not instead of you for the money they deserve don t be a mushroom upstart be an organizer be a truth teller be a fighter and if your own liberal ideals aren t enough to motivate you to do such things just remember that you ll be better off in the long run too you are not special neither are your adjunct colleagues but they live with that fact every day the point is that you need to learn that too if we are ever all going to save higher education together share this print opens in new window print share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit more email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading comments 12 comments categories academic labor adjunct faculty class labor he s leaving coursera that s how it worked out 17 07 2014 please forgive me this post is going to be more than a little self serving but as one of the very few people who actually completed princeton professor and friend of this blog jeremy adelman s world history mooc i think i ve earned that privilege i found this month old daily princetonian article last night on the twitterz adelman agreed to teach the course for three years after which the university will conduct a thorough review of its performance he said that he will offer the course next fall on a new startup platform novoed that allows for greater student engagement adelman said that he considered the first year s course a failure version 1 0 failed i hadn t realized how much the rituals of two physical lectures a week were like the spinal cord of the course he said it was like this blah course adelman said he also found that students were not engaging in the online discussion forums with non university students and many were not watching lectures regularly waiting until right before the exams however he said that he made adjustments to the course that resulted in very interactive projects and high participation creating online blogs and project assignments that would be posted online version 1 0 was of course the mooc that inspired my 16 part critique of the class which you can find here if you scroll down i d heard a lot of the stuff in that article exchanging e mails with jeremy and talking to him briefly after our aha panel back in january but i never heard him describe that course i took as a failure before i actually think he s being more than a little hard on himself the fault here lies not with the superprofessor or the students but with the course design and i m not talking about the assignments which he has apparently tweaked and improved but with the whole xmooc oriented similarity to his ordinary face to face world history class if you must mooc says me then you really should blow the whole thing up and start the world afresh that means little or no lectures with respect to history this would make introductory courses an impossibility since students wouldn t know the content otherwise coursera would hate it but this structure could put the kind of global dialogue that jeremy loves so much front and center imagine a worldwide research methods course during which students could share their findings with each other or even a historiography course in which students explain how historians from different lands around the world have confronted similar historiographic problems i remember trying to explain cmoocs to jeremy somewhere in the comments here that i won t dig up i hope that helped indeed i m delighted to see that he s retained the rights to his own course thereby making it possible for him to migrate to a better platform than coursera for the kinds of really innovative pedagogy which he enjoys i look forward to hearing about the details of the new course indeed at this rate i may have to stop referring to jeremy as a superprofessor perhaps it s not the moocs themselves are the problem then but just the massive part or maybe even just the corporate part these days i actually think it might be interesting to design a non massive online history course that would supplement rather than replace other traditional history classes keeping to that principle would require what s left of moocs to remain in the hands of caring faculty like jeremy rather than the folks down the road at penn who have actually invested in coursera hoping to use west philadelphia as a base to colonize the world moocs as pedagogical experiments rather than moocs as weapons it could happen those nice canadian people have been trying to do things that way for years jeremy s canadian it all kind of makes sense now doesn t it share this print opens in new window print share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit more email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading comments 2 comments categories moocs world history mooc why most moocs are boring for nearly everybody involved 13 07 2014 white collar professionals too are subject to routinization and degradation proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals instantiated in a system or process and then handed back to a new class of workers clerks who replace the professionals matthew b crawford shop class as soulcraft p 44 this post has more views than any other on the history of this blog i have no idea why ok i think it s because it shows up pretty high on the results list when somebody googles coursera or udacity because it gets about 100 hits a day these days but why that post gets all the traffic as opposed to anything else that i ve written about moocs is indeed a mystery to me even though i consider it to be a rather mild denunciation of inert moocs that students only absorb passively it has attracted a fair number of hostile comments by now i figure as long as passersby don t insult me or write something that s prima facie offensive i ll approve such comments for display yet i can t help but wonder what kind of people search the internet for anti mooc blog posts that they can denounce their authors my friend vanessa has suggested in the comments to that post that mooc providers have hired paid shills i m not sure i d go that far but there certainly are a fair number of people who are so excited by all the free content that they now have access to that they get very defensive on behalf of moocs and mooc providers inevitably these must be mostly people with college degrees already and therefore already know how to learn while they certainly have a right to defend their technological baby what they re really saying in the comments to that post is all i care about is how this new technology affects me me i m worried abut everybody else the professors who might potentially get displaced by moocs certainly includes me but i m also concerned about the students who don t know how to learn yet and might end up left with no other option but moocs in our shiny online educational future i m even concerned about the poor superprofessors who had no idea what they were signing up for when edx or coursera or whomever offered them the opportunity to become famous regardless of their actual merit as online teachers while some students who had nothing before moocs may be happy about them i would argue that the rest of these groups are mostly bored by the experience luckily the evidence has begun to appear for me to actually prove this point i a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down longtime readers know that i ve continually made the distinction between mooc producers and mooc consumers harvard and mit produce moocs the university of maryland system has recently begun consuming them integrating mooc content into a wide range of content across many campuses ithaka released a gates foundation funded study on these test runs last week as you might imagine given the funding source the results are generally positive all but one of the of the instructors said that they would use moocs inside their own classes again if given the opportunity however there are plenty of warning signs even in this positive study for example from p 18 finding and adapting online content to use for a hybrid course posed the greatest challenge for faculty partners moocs illustrate the priorities of their creators and these are not necessarily the same priorities that other faculty have for their individual students moreover academic departments develop degree program curricula as a whole making deliberate decisions about when and where certain content should be taught and competencies assessed within specific courses to integrate a mooc into an existing class is not necessarily a simple case of choosing what pieces to include or exclude even with online course materials that are a fairly close fit with the pedagogical approach of the instructor and needs of the students the local instructor may need to re conceptualize or restructure his or her existing course to fit with the online content if a mooc consuming professor has to fit a square peg into a round hole which is going to change first the mooc or their class since the consuming professor can t go back and change the superprofessor s work i think you know the answer to this question so why would anybody voluntarily subject themselves to that kind of de skilling of course there are incentives for professors who decide to farm out an important part of their job to superprofessors this is from p 26 of the study based on the data we collected the clearest potential for time savings appears to be in the amount of time instructors spent delivering courses those in the treatment sections spent just over half as much time in class as those teaching the control sections in one large course designed by a single course coordinator instructors in the mooc based sections told us they saved considerable time because they did not need to prepare content to teach and they spent less time in class once the initial investment is made in preparing the course instructors may be able to spend less time planning what to teach and actually coming to class on the one hand i d certainly like to spend less time preparing and coming to class but i also understand that what i bring to that process is part of the reason i get paid a living wage not being burnt out at least not yet finding interesting ways to deliver the content i spent seven years in graduate school studying and more time since refreshing is one of the most interesting aspects of my job more importantly i understand these moocish developments as part of a broader effort to destroy faculty prerogatives across the board most faculty understand this that s why the executive summary of the study notes it was clear that administrative leadership was essential to stimulate faculty interest this leadership will of course include professional and monetary incentives a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down the medicine go down medicine go down don t do it kiddies it s a trap once you re finally done cleaning up your room mary poppins is going to kick you out on the street and find a new set of less whiny children who are less likely to make any demands upon her at all ii pity the poor superprofessor yeah i m going to hit this whole massivelearning thing one more time i hadn t planned to but this post by aposotolos k includes the message that coursera sent paul oliver dehaye s students and it s just too disturbing for me to ignore here s a quote from ...
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