I am getting ready for my teaching schedule to get into full swing. I started my Live Online class already. Having done live online since covid it hasn’t been too bad. I have never done this class fully live online before so it is a challenge in some ways. But not too bad.
My labs at BSU start up tomorrow, and while they shouldn’t be too much work I have a feeling they will be a bit of work. I will have to read the labs closely beforehand and make sure I know what to expect in those labs. I have never done these exact labs before so I am not sure what exactly to expect. I have done labs for 20+ years, but every lab is a little different. I will be interested to see how much grading work it will create for me. I am told that the expectation is that the students will complete the entire lab in class each day and submit it at the end of class. So, I am not sure what that means for my take home workload. I guess I will find out.
But the real workload has been with the on your own time class I am starting next week for SCC. This is something that a colleague and I worked on together last spring and got the basics down for it. Well, more than the basics. We split up the initial work and get it all set up. But I have spent MANY hours over the last couple weeks making sure it all looks good. Then I was working on setting up the due dates in the system for every assignment, getting all the online labs setup on the online lab site, making intro videos for each week’s module, then uploading them to Youtube, and then creating links to then embed into the course site.
So much work.
Now, the class is ready to go. I hope the students appreciate the work that was put into it. But the work isn’t over yet. I see this one online class being a lot of work throughout the semester. I am guessing that I will spend 45-60 minutes per student per week grading their work. And as of right now I have 31 students in that class. I fully expect to spend more time on that class alone each week then I have spent on classes in the last 16-17 years. I will certainly be spending more time in a week then I did while I was full time, and I am getting paid about ⅓ of what I was making full time for the same course.
Oh well it is what I signed up for. I am joyful and blessed that I still get to work for SCC. I want to keep supporting that school, and the Maricopa district as a whole. I really hope I get to keep teaching for the district, if not specifically SCC, for years to come. I hope that I can keep doing this on your own time class for SCC for a while. I am not too hopeful on that once they hire a new full time person to replace the vacancy I left, which they should be able to do for the next school year starting in 2025, since they won’t need an adjunct to take a single class most likely. But I can hope. I hope that I can maybe pick up a class or two at other colleges in the Maricopa district maybe, but time will tell. I am now in Idaho and maybe I need to focus on classes here in Idaho, if I can find them and they want me, and they pay well enough to justify it.
But boy is it going to be a LOT of work right now.
You need to figure out how to use AI to speed the grading.
I use the online grading already for some of it in the labs. But I am a fan of hands on grading and hands on work. And I also hate the idea of having students pay $100 each just to have online homework that a computer grades. And it still wouldn’t grade things like journal reflections and video assignments. So, I have to do it myself. Oh well. This semester will be a learning time and I will make modifications as needed.