Yay! Another class down — just filed grades for the ten magazine-writing students who survived to the end of the semester.
That’s the highest survival rate I’ve seen since I started teaching these online courses — ten of the original twenty made it all the way through eight long weeks. And that, interestingly is pretty good for a community college course, especially one that’s mounted online.
Why? I mean, why would so many last, not why do so many drop. Community college students have so many headaches, problems, and challenges that at any give time in their lives they have to make choices, and when they get overwhelmed one of the easiest choices is to drop a course. I attribute it to the change from Blackboard to the new Canvas online courseware. It is so much less bloated than Blackboard and so much easier to use, I expect students found it far less onerous to figure out and navigate.
Every bit as much less onerous than I did, as a matter of fact. Once the course materials were online, running the course was ridiculously easy. This was the first time I’ve felt that $2400 was fair pay for a Heavenly Gardens course.
Interestingly, too, the grade curve came out looking more normal. Usually at the end of the semester my magazine-writing students have either As and Bs or Fs, with little or nothing in between. This term I entered 2 As, 4 Bs, 3 Cs, and 1 D. And that, I expect, can be attributed to the relatively high survival rate — in the past, only the most determined and competent students have made it to the end of the term. If these students hung in there because simply navigating the course was pretty simple, that would mean more C-level students would have lasted.
Next semester instead of asking them to get all the course ground rules by reading the syllabus — something many of them evidently can’t do — I’m going to add a video in which I go over all the high points and show them how to find the materials on-screen and also where to submit papers.
Astonishingly, Canvas didn’t go down once. Not a single glitch made it impossible for classmates to find course materials or file assignments. Based on past experience with Blackboard, which always crashes at the worst possible moment, I had asked them to e-mail papers to me. That, of course, is a hassle, for them as well as for me. Several classmates quickly figured out how to submit their papers through Canvas, making it extremely easy to access, grade, and return the stuff. So, next semester turning in papers on Canvas will be required.
The community college district sent out a notice that they’re cutting part-timers’ hours so as to avoid having to provide health insurance for adjuncts. Instead of seven courses a year, you can now teach only six. They plead poverty. That’s ridiculous, of course: the district rakes in millions of dollars in tuition, grants, and taxes, and is about to raise our property taxes again. The real reason is right-wing dominance in county government, which, like the state and most city governments here, is run by the kookocracy. They hate Obama and hate anything even moderately progressive, so they’re sinking their heels in the sand in an attempt to sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act.
Doesn’t apply to me, thank God, since I quit teaching freshman comp. But it will harm every adjunct who’s trying to scrabble together a living while pursuing the faint hope of a full-time position, and of course it will harm the hoards of part-time clerical, customer service, and admin staff the district hires.
I probably should try to pick up an online course at the Great Desert University. GDU pays adjuncts a munificent $3300 per semester (oooooohhh! $206.25 a week!!) for adjuncts with the Ph.D. But GDU still uses Blackboard — decidedly, it is not worth struggling with Blackboard for $206. And there’s no way I’m going into a face-to-face classroom again. It’s just too stressful and too dangerous.
Moment of Fame: This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance appears at Wealth Pilgrim. Proprietor Neal Frankle included the rumination in which I decided to keep the Dog Chariot.
How sad it is that teachers will suffer because of the politics of Obama Care…My thought…it’s the law….let’s deal with it and make it as sucessful as we can. Your comments on Community College and the high “drop rate” brought back memories from my college days back in the 70’s. I was working a full time job and going to school on “my dime” at night so I sure wasn’t dropping anything. It was back then, just as you describe today… big turn out for the first couple of classes and then …shall we say “parking was no longer a problem”. I took a class once that I had to sit in the hallway on the first night as there were 68 students at the first class, the teacher requested and got a bigger room for the following week. He shouldn’t have bothered …. three …… finished the class…I was one of the three. We could have held the last couple of classes in a phone booth! I always wondered what the teachers were paid for these classes…$206 a week…doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me for the responsibilty.
They struggle to stay in the classes, and sometimes you can tell that they’re doing the best they can to hang on. It can be pretty overwhelming for them: many are single parents, trying to hold one or two jobs and often dealing with other issues, such as aging parents or crazy siblings. Some are not the greatest students to start with — something like half of US incoming freshmen need remedial work, and the rate is undoubtedly higher in the two-year schools. They don’t read well (so a huge investment in a textbook feels even more counterproductive); their study skills are weak; half the time they’re on the brink of exhaustion. And in the Southwest, large numbers are ESL students or native speakers of English who grew up in homes where a second language is spoken (not necessarily Spanish, we might add).
And it must be said that into each student’s life some rain must fall: sooner or later it seems that every one of them runs into a Semester from Hell, in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong…all at once.