Twitter thread blows up over issue that doesn’t exist and is misrepresentation of reality.
Sounds like Twitter working as usual.
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Sort of, though, right? You get paid by the 3-credit class. If it was 2 (a variable credit seminar), or 4 (embedded lab) the scale would be different?
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True, but it’s not directly by the class, like how they compensate (HA! HA! HA!) me. It’s a difference in salary, yeah? And that will vary by university, by type of institution, and by how long you’ve been around and how close you are to making tenure, much like other salaried jobs.
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Welcome to the comments section!
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We are expected to maintain a certain average course load though, so if we rack up a deficit in instructional hours we either have to pay those hours back when we retire or keep teaching for free until we’re out of hock.
It never occurred to me that I might be expected to keep working off an instructional deficit after death.
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Wait, what? Tenured/tenure track at an accredited public university/college? Huh?
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That’s how it works at my community college anyway. Which can be a problem when the department doesn’t have the budget to offer all the classes it would take to give all tenured faculty a full-time course load every semester.
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Yes, welcome!
So it sounds like the 3rd party company dropped the ball a bit? In the official course listing at your university you are listed as the professor? It’s a toughy, I guess, since creating it was the hard work of the professor that passed away. Credit where it is due vs credit where it is due, so to speak.
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FTFY
ETA: Yeah, sometimes it feels like the point of academics is to subsidize football, and yeah, not everyone should need a college degree to get a decent job, and yeah, the gatekeeping should be about who wants to spend some years in intense pursuit of knowledge (not everyone does) rather than who can afford it…
There are a lot of problems, but most of them aren’t with the motivations of professors.
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So, they mostly work in farming…er, artificial intelligence?
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Heh. As the department reminds us any chance they can, 98% employment upon graduation, in their field.
Kind of like crossfitters or vegans, that way.
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Exactly. This is nothing but prejudice against the metabolically-challenged.
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As an adjunct, I was only paid for the hours I spent in the classroom. In order to teach I was required to read the books; prepare the syllabus, lectures, and labs; write tests and quizzes; grade them; etc.
It isn’t possible to both lecture and prep at the same time. You certainly need to know your subject well enough to be able to give a lecture without advance prep. And it’s easy enough to wing a quiz at the class on the whiteboard. But it’s essentially impossible to write a test in real-time while the students are taking it, and it’s effectively impossible with online tests.
I was only paid for the activities that took place in front of students. I assume that anything I did on my own unpaid-by-the-school time was mine; but I now realize I never checked my contract. (Not that it matters; all I have left from those classes were any notes I may have taken while prepping.)
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Ug that’s depressing. I hope your institution appreciates you and if not, I hope they find a way to make it easier for you to do your work! 
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from the point of view of the teacher, i never thought of this because its kinda new but in most other media part of a contract includes reproduction rights. Did this professor know his videos would be used without him? of course he’s dead so he doesn’t care, but what about teachers who have quit or been laid off or moved? They should be getting royalties the way an author does for audible streams.
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Huh. I once found out I was teaching a subject with which I was only mildly familiar–not in my specialty, but tangentially related (think Early Modern European/Africanist being asked to teach 20th century British diplomacy)–one day before class started. This was on top of my 3-prep/4-class load. The first week of lectures did not involve an instructor knowing the subject very well. The semester featured lots of “today we’re going to read some primary sources in-class and do some exercises” days.
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Except that 90% of academics I know (and i know a few) wish they had fewer teaching responsibilities so they can get on with research. Moreover, it makes perfect sense to replay lectures for content that hasn’t changed since last year (which should be almost all of a decent undergrad course) and then focus actual teaching resources on direct interaction.
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According to a commenter with direct knowledge above, yes. It also sounds like he was compensated for the work.
It’s still short-changing the students by not giving them access to the course’s lecturer, per a traditional course. It also sounds like the e-learning company is doing a little corner-cutting of its own, but at least this was done with his co-opertion and he was paid. I don’t know if that’s going to be the case once this practise becomes more widespread, though.
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Harsh!
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