Well, I came away from the community college’s four-day-long series of training workshops feeling quite pleased. Really, I’d call them “courses,” because they were so full of content. A lot of new ideas surfaced, even though the instructor had already introduced me to many of the concepts in one-on-ones over the past several weeks. I also discovered a passle of new-to-me resources, and it was a nice opportunity to meet other faculty.
The faculty support the Maricopa Community College District provides for its adjunct faculty exceeds astonishing. Many of us were actually paid to attend these workshops, unheard-of at the Great Desert University. Not only that, but yesterday another set of paid(!!!) teacher training workshops was announced, coming up this fall.
You have to have worked at a university, where adjuncts are the lowest of the low, to understand how remarkable that is. Of course, it behooves the district to treat adjuncts decently, since 80 percent of its faculty is adjunct. However, the same can be said of any university freshman composition program, and I can assure you, “decently” is not the operative term in those precincts.
From what I can tell, Paradise Valley’s faculty support is outstanding across the board, whether for adjuncts or for full-timers. In the first place, community college full-time faculty are paid a decent wage—significantly more than most GDU faculty earn. But more to the point, Paradise Valley has enough support staff, and their training fits the faculty’s needs.
At this point, GDU West has one lonely (very excellent, very hard-working) IT staffer providing BlackBoard training and support; another who used to help was moved to the main campus. Even before the crash provided an excuse to gut the West campus’s staff, these two women were massively overworked. They could point you in the right direction, but ultimately you learned what you could about the software and about online course design by the seat of your pants. On rare occasions, the university would mount a two-hour workshop, but these were often led by faculty who had no more training than the rest of us in online instruction—it was, in short, the blind leading the blind.
The woman who led this summer’s workshops not only is experienced in teaching college-level courses, she’s completing a Ph.D. in instructional design. And it shows. She has really smart ideas about ways to set up an online course so students can navigate quickly and simply, and she also offered a number of strategies to keep the course academically rigorous without killing the instructor with overwork.
So personally, I’m very pleased about the outcome for the magazine writing course. What I’ve learned from her is going to make the course much more effective, and I’m really looking forward to engaging these ideas.
I can’t say whether this is typical of all community colleges, although I wouldn’t be surprised, since a community college’s mandate is teaching, rather than an amalgam of teaching, service, and research. Lower-division students, in particular, tend to get short shrift at universities: gigantic classes, tyro instructors, and little administrative support. If I had children who were going to attend a state university—or if I were a person who was about to embark on a four-year degree program—I would strongly recommend taking the first two years at a community college and then transferring.
The value received goes way beyond the savings in tuition, which are substantial. The real value: your students will be going to a school where somebody cares whether they succeed.
I went back to college after nearly 30 years away from higher ed. Thank heavens I started at a community college: The admissions and financial aid folks held my hand through the process. The smaller class size meant the teachers knew who you were and actually appeared to give a damn about you. The students themselves were an interesting bunch; the average age at the college I attended was 30. Some, like me, were a lot older than that. There was also an interesting mix of international students, displaced workers and people who, like me, decided to go back and get the degrees we’d never been able to get when we were young.
So you’d get the cab driver who back home was an electrical engineer, and the 19-year-old girl who was raising her 14-year-old sister while attending school and working as a translator at a hospital.
When people sneer at “junior colleges,” I always say they’re not all the same — any more than a “major university” necessarily provides a better education than a state one.