Book Discussion (Fall 2018) - Burritt Library Excite Group and CTFD

Question: How has the professor’s work changed?

Answers:

1. Incorporation of technology
2. Revenue generation expected
3. Our expectations of students have changed, and students’ expectations have changed, as well
4. Trivial tasks assigned to professors (e.g., syllabi)
5. Pressure to get through certain amount of material/content
6. Policy makers and politicians impacting teaching practices
7. More administrative push-down
8. Required to complete more grant applications (revenue, research)
9. Marketing new programs and budgeting responsibilities
10. We don’t know if students who are taking online courses are actually doing the work (or having someone else do it for them).

 

Question: How has the model of “students as customers” changed teaching?

Answers:

1. Students expect quick responses from professors when they send emails, but then the students never respond to the professors (so profs spend time worried that students did not receive their answers)
2. Enrollment/retention pressure
3. Faculty now responsible for retaining students
4. Are we helping or hurting students by “holding their hands?”
5. We must model self-care for our students by setting clear boundaries for ourselves that students can use as examples (e.g., taking time off, getting enough sleep, slowing down, etc.)
6. We need to make “busy-ness” uncool

Suggestions

Note: Page 3 of the book – being an academic is a privilege. We’ve let work become drudgery, instead of enjoying our professions.

Suggestions: We need to mentor each other

Book Suggestion: The Challenge of Care by (author unknown). I could not find this book in Amazon. We will need more information from person who cited the title of the book.

Students have trouble buying books for many reasons:

Bookstore logistics

Purpose of textbooks (students don’t see books as important)

Money – prices of books and priority in students’ lives (necessities of living vs. luxuries of learning)

Mindset

Students don’t retain as much information from online texts

Print books make a difference

Multi-Tasking sucks! It’s bad.

Page 29 of the book: how long it takes an experienced computer user to return to a task or to the “zone” of focusing on a task.

For those “recovering perfectionists,” sometimes “good enough” has to be the goal/has “to do.”

Learning which instructional tasks are important and which are not.

Share information with students about not responding to every text message, phone call, app on their cell phones.

One faculty member shared his experiences of having graduated from an Eastern European educational “system.” (Note to EXCITE! librarians: do we want to publicize an online discussion application so that some of these conversation points don’t get “lost?”)

Technology is stressing out both faculty and students.

Student doing homework from home are multi-tasking and so it takes them longer to do homework.

Teaching students to use self-discipline in regards to technology (i.e., smart phones and social media) instead of taking away or banning phones from the classrooms.