Considering Online Office Hours

By LastQuest | Flickr |CC-BY-SA

At San Antonio College, a community college in Texas, officials are considering allowing full-time faculty to hold up to half of their required 10-hours a week of office hours online, according to Inside Higher Ed. It’s hard to accurately describe how fully I agree with this statement by Dawn Elmore-McCrary, a proponent of the policy:

“Since we’re doing it anyway, it should be part of we do,” she said. “It serves that population of students that can’t come to campus or don’t want to come to campus.”

This rings very true to me. E-mail is the major way that I have contact with my students outside of class, followed by telephone messages, followed by in-person drop-ins during office hours. (The reigning champion for most student contact is actually questions in the 5 minutes before or after class, a time when students are least likely to receive a helpful answer to a complex issue, but most likely to consider the issue dealt with because they’ve mentioned a question).

I can see the structural problems here. I’m not sure online office hours would be any better attended than regular office hours without a real push to explain the technology available (Skype, chat, etc.). I’ve experimented with online chats in place of or in addition to office hours before, but most students don’t want to use our Learning Management System’s chat feature (or simply forget). Most students also don’t want to (or forget) to drop by during office hours, as well, even though this is hands-down the most effective way to improve a course grade.

Having a scheduled time during which students could expect a rapid response to questions might be a good solution to some problems, particularly if the conversation aspects of chat media could be emphasized. I’m also, of course, in favor of recording the efforts made outside of the classroom to converse with students as part of the faculty contract.

I’m interested to see how this issue — currently tabled — turns out. Anyone had any positive (or negative) experiences with online office hours? Good methods, bad, etc.?

The Wiki-Graders of the Future

Unlike Kevin Drum, I look with mild (resigned?) horror upon the wiki graders of our future:

I’m still willing to bet [Brown University computer scientist Eugene Charniak] $10,000 that a computer will be as good as a human at scoring fact-based high school essays by — oh, let’s say 2022 just to make it sporting. I figure there’s at least a chance I could lose that bet. 2032 would be a no-brainer. Later in the piece, after noting that new techniques have produced quantum leaps in language processing before, Danaweighs in on this:

A paper by ETS’s Derrick Higgins and Beata Beigman Klebanov points to a potential path forward: using Web databases of human knowledge, like online encyclopedias and news repositories, to check how factual and intellectually sophisticated an essay truly is.

….[One] program, called ReVerb, can recognize about one-third of the “facts” writers present on such topics, such as the century in which Chaucer lived (the 14th) and Einstein’s most famous scientific contribution (the Theory of Relativity)….Currently, however, computers struggle with determining how trustworthy various Web sources are, and they can’t weigh or synthesize competing claims from good sources.

Having unreliable sources reading and checking for the reliability of sources sounds just… awesome. I’ll be over here giving MLA Scavenger Hunts and weeping if anyone needs me.

MLA urges colleges to include digital scholarship in hiring

Well, this is just fascinating. A professional incentive for creating digital, scholarly works? Hooray.

Should CCs delegate to for-profit schools?

“Dean Dad” at Inside Higher Ed suggests that one way to deal with the proliferation of for-profit colleges and the depletion of funding for non-profit community colleges would be for CCs to “delegate” some of the more expensive programs. He writes:

This position puts me outside the usual camps.  One camp says that the way to compete with the for-profits is to do it all.  Another says that we should become more like them, and focus more intensely on workforce training.  I’m thinking those are both basically doomed.  The way to thrive in the new normal is not to try to be great at everything; the world is just too big.  Instead, it’s to find something you do really well, and own that.  Let the for-profits handle HVAC repair and dental hygiene; let the community colleges do the first two years of four year degrees…

Does this seem sustainable, or is this just surrender by another name?

Well, since you asked… can’t it be both? I’ve had many students come through my class who are working toward a dental hygiene degree. I’m not sure they would have fared well in for-profit schools; I’m not sure those schools would even be feasible for those students. If one of the missions of Community College is to provide an education that’s accessible for the community, eliminating certain programs based on their cost is going to reduce the scope of that offer. My guess is that, given the choice between pursuing a dental hygiene career at For Profit U for twice the cost or getting an Office Assisting Certificate from Local CC, students will change their career goals to suit what’s financially possible. After that, CCs will still end up with just as many students, but we’ll be offering fewer paths to advancement. Not an ideal place to be.

Then again, something does have to change, and maintaining programs that require expensive equipment can seem to be a major drag on shrinking budgets. The better solution might be public-private partnerships that allow some of the more expensive, technical pieces of the curriculum to happen off site, making someone else responsible for updates and upkeep of pricey materials. The benefit to a hospital, or a dentist’s office, or a major industrial plant of having a ready crew of people who can work in nursing or HVAC or whatever could be (but I really mean should be) incentive to build and maintain these facilities. It isn’t yet, but it does seem like it should be.

This also misses another point, which is that every part of education is becoming more expensive at the moment. Teaching writing used to involve a pencil and paper and a book. Now, increasingly, it involves instruction into technology — if not directly in the classroom, then at least by paid experts on campus who are willing to help student users one-on-one.

I don’t think delegation, therefore, is a good long term solution, and in the short term, it could lead to community colleges just falling further behind in updating necessary equipment. But I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks, particularly if you’ve have had experience with a for-profit school.

Collegiality in E-mail

Part of the challenge of today’s college classroom is e-mail. There’s a ton of it; it’s always waiting for you; you can access it from anywhere, so you begin to feel you should access it from anywhere; and once you access it, it’s hardly ever completely easy to deal with.

Though I love the ease of contact that e-mail allows for my students (and myself!), sometimes I’ve found that e-mail messages can make mountains sprout from molehills. This is mostly due to tone. The instructors I know often take student e-mails very literally — which is to say, having been trained as writers, we read abrupt messages and believe they’re meant to seem short and angry. Usually, I think, this is not the case; students now e-mail from their phones or in a dashed-off minute between classes (or levels of WoW).

I stumbled across Janni Aragon’s rules for collegiality in e-mail this week, and it’s just about perfect. An excerpt:

Never send an email that you have initial misgivings with or give you pause. Don’t send it. You might have a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean that you are making smart decisions. The tendency is to be less formal and send an incomplete sort of email.

Heh. The list is short and worth reading. I might start giving the link to my students.

Wikipedia — shock! — contains errors

Every term, I give the Wikipedia talk. It’s changed over the years a bit; I don’t just rule it out, as I once did. Instead, we talk about how Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, can be an excellent starting place for research, but how it’s not — by itself — a credible source for college-level writing.

Science Daily points out even further evidence of why it’s important to teach students to approach Wikipedia with a critical eye. A PRSA study recently found that 60 percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors. Moreover, once alerted to the errors, the companies who tried to make corrections often couldn’t — whether because they found the editing system too difficult, because they couldn’t get help through the Talk page, or because they feared backlash if found correcting their own information.

That last one is really an interesting consideration in online publications. I usually like that editors are named in the Wikipedia history page, but I’d never considered the chance of legitimate changes being stifled by the same system. I’ve never taught students to consider that, either; we tend to work with a simple system of assumed bias.

The Problem of Microsoft Word in Academia

Both of the colleges I work at currently use Microsoft Word as their standard word processing programs. It’s supported by the IT help desks and present on all of the computers students can use to type papers. This means, as well, that most faculty use Word, and I’ve taken to encouraging students in my class to become at least passingly familiar with it.

There are a host of reasons why, but it’s mainly because of everything I’ve just said: Word is supported by the college. I know everyone in my class has access to it via college computers, for no cost (except the student fees that eventually pay for technology upgrades). Also, I have Word on my office and home computers, so when we trade papers electronically, I can always open Word attachments.

But there are several reasons to avoid Word, and they’re becoming more significant. The first of these is, simply, that it’s expensive. A student version of Microsoft Office costs about $159 — much more than a basic writing textbook — and, like a textbook, it’s going to want an upgrade in 3 or 4 years. (Add to this cost the problem and price of constant operating system updates and the short usable lifespan of today’s computers). Unlike the textbook, it’s relatively difficult to share it with friends, and you can’t sell it back at the end of the term. It’s also getting harder to port MSOffice from machine to machine because the salad days of disc loans are better known as the Golden Age of Home Piracy to our friends at Microsoft.

Another good reason to avoid Word is covered by Tom Scocca in Slate this week: it’s a terrible, terrible text editing program if you’re writing for the Web. As he writes:

For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.

In my academic life, this has an impact in two ways. First, for writing things (like this blog) that appear online, I have to use something other than Word. I use MarsEdit, a paid application ($40), that lets me easily hand-code HTML or use speed keys or menus to spice things up with media or tables.

Second, and more painful and common, Word messes up our Content Management Systems. Sure, it’s usually OK to upload a Word doc for students to download — usually, though PDF is still the preferred, weighty method for this — but woe unto the person who writes their forum post first in Word and then copies it to Moodle. The formatting will not only be so crazy as to obscure the meaning, it has a solid chance of ruining the page formatting so severely that only tech support can save the course. This goes, as well, for instructions and postings from the teacher. We’ve actually be lectured, over Moodle, at least twice in my tenure by our Moodle managers to never use Word to compose text we’ll be using in Moodle.

So after years of trying to get students to use Word, and to ignore its awful grammar check, and to be comfortable with things like Word Wrap and Headers and Double Spacing, now I face having to explain that, no, they can’t use comfy old Word when they want to write for the Web.

It’s frustrating. I’d like to have a better alternative to suggest, but the frontrunners are unappealing, too. Google Docs sounds great, until you realize not everyone is online all the time, and OpenOffice isn’t well supported at either school. Is it too much to hope Word will improve in the future?

Probably.

Is Spelling No Longer Important?

Link: “You Autocomplete Me: Could Web-search algorithms make spelling a lost art?” at Slate.com.

That noise you hear is a thousand English teachers screaming — or it’s just me because I’m very loud about these things (emphasis added):

With spelling becoming more and more optional, it’s easy to draw a parallel to the changing nature of arithmetic. Once upon a time, if you wanted to divide 154 by 19.6, you had to get out a pen and paper. Now, an electronic calculator—or the calculator on your computer or your watch or your iPhone—will do it for you. Just as long division has become all but obsolete, could autocomplete make spelling a lost art—something for kids to learn in elementary school, never to use again?

The article discusses whether autocorrect and spell check could combine (as they do in GoogleDocs) to create a new, better spell check that will require even less thought about spelling. It also mentions this:

Far from making spelling obsolete, traditional spell-checkers often serve to reinforce its importance. A widely cited 2005 study found that students actually caught fewer spelling and grammar mistakes when their word processor’s language-checking program was turned on. The explanation: People placed undue confidence in the software, skipping over misspellings that the computer didn’t flag.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. To the extent that any program wants to take over spelling responsibilities, I have mixed feelings. I love and use spell check myself, but it doesn’t take the place of proofreading. You also have to know the right words to use and what they look like and what they mean before you start, something that’s probably stalled a bit by introducing spell checking earlier and earlier in a child’s writing career. Spelling tests seem less necessary, I bet, when the information has to be instantly discarded in order to text your friends after class.

Spell check (and an included electronic thesaurus) can neither expand your vocabulary nor proofread for you, but the more work it does do, the less likely people are to remember that final, vital step.

Professor suggests paying students to study instead of work

I heard this piece on “Here and Now” Friday and spent most of the car ride nodding my head in agreement. Wick Sloane, an adjunct professor in Boston and a former college administrator, suggests that paying students $10 an hour to study a few times a week would earn a greater return on investment for federal student aid funds. He suggests that community college students in general would benefit from the money — not just as an incentive, but as a way of making college feasible. More:

“[Community college students] are people who usually work 40 plus hours a week. They’re trying to take three or four courses. They have long commutes back and forth. They have rent to pay,” Sloane continued.  “What’s misunderstood in our public policy debates about college today is that someone who goes to school for four years and stays in a dorm has become the non-traditional student.”

In his latest “Inside Higher Ed” column, Sloane proposed paying students to study by allocating funding from the existing $978 million Federal Work-Study Program’s budget for a pilot program. Under Sloane’s plan, students would swipe cards into supervised study areas. They would be paid $10 per hour, with a cap at $1,200 per semester, an amount comparable to the existing cap on Federal Work-Study awards.

Sloane says that the single greatest problem facing community college students is finding the time and space to study. For many, an extra three or four extra hours a week means “the difference between succeeding or failing, mastering college algebra or not.”

In my (admittedly limited) experience, that’s absolutely true. It’s often a few hours a week that would make a difference for my students. When faced with having to decide between showing up for work or spending an extra hour with a textbook, there’s not much choice if work puts food on the table now — even if education would put better food (or more food) on the table later.

This is also a great argument for why textbook prices should be a major concern for educators, particularly at the community college level. Using the same expensive books that universities use might seem to put our students on equal footing, but instead, I think high textbook costs can really exclude some students from class. They can’t afford to buy the books until financial aid kicks in, which is sometimes well into the term; by that time, they’ve already lost valuable study time and a chance to get the basics of the class down. Plus, when the choice is a $110 book or groceries for a month — even I know what I’d pick (and I love books!).

The rest of Sloane’s column is here. Worth a read.

A resource for quoting well

LINK: Quoting Well, Part 1, at the Chronicle

via Siobhan Curious.