Recently a crowdsourcing project has spun up to try to understand which schools are great to their adjuncts and which could use some improvement (or shaming).

The Adjunct Project started as a simple google docs spreadsheet with a low expectation for how many people would provide some information.  At last count there are more than 1300 distinct records in the spreadsheet and it is growing all the time.  The document holds records from everything between the ivy league and the for-profits.  Rural to urban, large to small, there are a lot in here already and it’s still growing.

I encourage you to go add your information.  This could well result in a clearer picture than normal of the conditions under which adjuncts work.

To those of you whose ONLY job is as an adjunct, I urge you to open your imagination and find another line of work that will pay you a living wage.  Adjunct instruction is good for little more than a part time side gig, and it won’t be until they can’t FIND idle bodies to teach their classes that colleges and universities will begin to see that the system needs to change.

Nonetheless, in the last week I have written to my legislators twice over stupid bills currently moving through the process.  That’s a lot.  I usually just throw my hands up in frustration, vote for the democrats even if it makes me uncomfortable and know full well my neighbors have negated the impact of my vote by pretty much always voting for the other guy.  (I abhor SB1070 as much as anyone, but make myself feel better about the whole thing by reminding myself that it’s almost certainly unconstitutional and should get shot down by the supreme court.)

What got me writing?

SB1467 – This is being called the G-rated bill.  It essentially says that all teachers, including state-funded colleges and universities, must comply with the FCC profanity and obscenity guidelines.  These guidelines are intended to protect CHILDREN.  Not legal adults, like you find in higher education.  More importantly, they are incredibly vague from the perspective of someone who teaches a course that involves Sexuality and Gender.  Psychology, Nursing, Physiology, Public Health, etc.  All have valid reasons to teach courses that would involve language that, to some, might violate those guidelines.  More importantly, the law includes punishments that start with 1 week unpaid suspension.  I would be unable to teach my psych 101 class, and many others would find it incredibly difficult to teach their courses as well.

HB2770 – This one basically creates a protected status for academics (in humanities, social sciences and arts only) who have different political perspectives than the mainstream.  Now, we all know that most people in education and sociology lean left, so this rule appears to be designed to make being a conservative a protected status.  The irony of that in Arizona is hardly lost on me, although it appears lost on them.  Beyond it likely being unconstitutional, this bill is unnecessary.  A conservative academic studying politics in the academy stated “our research offers little evidence that conservative students or faculty are the victims of widespread ideological persecution”.

HEY LEGISLATORS:  I haven’t the foggiest idea why you feel these bills are appropriate things to waste time on.  I have something better:  ”Nearly 70 percent of all homes with a mortgage in Phoenix area were under water at the end of 2010″  It’s 2012 and home values have either stabilized or continued to fall. My loan-to-value is 165%.  How about the legislature working to fix that instead of monitoring how I talk to adult  college students or creating foolish new protected classes.

My day job involves using education data to improve the experience of students.  Specifically I am working on a predictive model that will serve as an early warning system when students begin to have problems in a course.  The idea is that there are a LOT of resources out there that students don’t use because either they are unaware of them or they are so tied up with their own issues that it never occurs to them.  I want to change that by spotting signs of trouble while the student is still taking the class and proactively offering them help.

This conference is an ideal tie-in to this work, and an area where I could easily see myself forming a research agenda as well as a satisfying work life.  We collect so much information; everything we do is tracked electronically and recorded somewhere.  There have to be ways to use this information for something other than selling us another book on Amazon.  I want to work on finding those other uses.  (Frankly this may be the perfect field for me; I have 20 years in IT prior to getting my PhD, almost all of it in databases and data management.  Now I can apply those skills to a real problem.  Very appropriate.)

The goal of the course itself is to provide context and background to the learning analytics field. In many ways it is a small, emerging field, and while there are some things we know there is a lot more we need to know.  The course helps develop people and bring awareness to the field.  Here is the course description:

Capturing and analyzing data has changed how decisions are made and resources are allocated in businesses, journalism, government, and military and intelligence fields. Through better use of data, leaders are able to plan and enact strategies with greater clarity and confidence. Data is a value point that drives increased organizational efficiency and a competitive advantage. Simply, analytics provide new insight and actionable intelligence. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Amazon are investing heavily in technologies and techniques in helping individuals and organizations makes sense of, and unlock the value within, big data.

In education, the use of data and analytics to improve learning is referred to as learning analytics. Analytics have not yet made the impact on education that they have made in other fields. That’s changing. Software companies, researchers, educators, and university leaders are starting to recognize the value of data in improving not only teaching and learning, but the entire education industry.

This course will provide an (generally non-technical) introduction to learning analytics and how they are being deployed in various contexts in the education field. Additionally, the tools and methods, ethics and privacy, and the systemic impact of analytics will be explored, presenting a broad overview of the current state and possible future directions of the field.

I invite any of you who are interested in how we can use data to inform and improve our teaching to join the class.

http://lak12.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/login.cgi?action=Register

I’ll be posting over the next few weeks my thoughts and observations from the class, so you can certainly follow that way as well.  You can also follow me on twitter (@protoscholar) or the conference as a whole by following #lak12

Teaching two sections is new; in early December I pointed out that all the stats sections were full for the upcoming semester and that, perhaps rather than wasting my skills teaching Psych 101 (which I am not that great at in the first place), we should open another stats section.  They were skeptical, but decided to give a late night (8:15-10:15) section a try to see if it “made”.  (Administrator talk for had enough enrollments to be worth the cost of offering.)

HAH.  Not only did it make, but it’s full.  FULL.  24 students willing to come to class until after 10pm 2 days a week.  Whodathunkit.  So now, for this semester, I get to do every lecture twice in a row.  I think I’m going to need a lot more water.

Of course since this worked out so well, I’ll probably be stuck teaching 2 back to back sections forever…

Seriously, can we add that last one to every election.  I would be SO MUCH HAPPIER if there were a “None of the above” choice…

When I was working on my degree most of the faculty would have been appalled to hear where I was working.  For-profit was synonymous with evil.  There was no grey zone to most of them.  But since that was the only place that was able to pay a reasonable salary, I stayed and just didn’t get into it with the faculty.

In my current role things are a little tenuous; due to some internal politics, it’s not clear who I will be reporting to or what I will be doing 3-6 months in the future, although it’s fairly certain to change.  That could be good (opportunity) or it could be bad (doing things I’m just not that interested in).  But I’ve been playing it cool because, frankly, I have been comfortable.

Now something interesting has come up.  A position at my alma mater doing analysis for the budget and planning office.  It would pay slightly less (within 5%) of what I make now, come with an office instead of a cube, have a director title instead of a manger title (although still no direct reports), and make me eligible for pretty cushy set of benefits by private industry standards.  (People who have it complain, but really until they’ve work outside of a state university they have NO idea how little some companies offer.)

All that having been said, in some ways the job itself is a step backwards.  (The step up in title is just to make sure they could afford someone like me.)  I would be doing less of the cutting edge stuff I’m doing now, be less involved in the industry groups and publishing my research, and doing more mundane query-jockey stuff.  Oh, and have to pay an insane amount per year for parking, which I know sounds petty, but is vaguely irritating.

Nonetheless, I’m still strongly considering it.  This week is 2nd round interviews.  I will take half a day off and go talk to them.

So I’ve been asking myself WHY I am willing to take the bad things about this in order to change jobs and have come up with a couple of things:  I like the idea of the stability and knowing what I’ll be doing a few months from now, I like the benefits even if the salary is a bit less, and I like the idea of working for a not-for-profit again.

That last one is irritating.  I thought I had gotten over my snobbishness about that kind of thing, but apparently it’s still there, just suppressed.  I still look down on the for-profits as a place to build a career.  I see them fill a role, just not one I want to be involved with.  I’m not sure I like that about myself right now…

The thing is that there is very little difference in terms of the two types of organizations.  Non-profit educational institutions are every bit as concerned about money as for-profit colleges and universities.  This particular school is one of a wave of research institutions who, in the past few years, have made it clear that if a department or scholar isn’t bringing in enough money to pay their salary and support staff, they aren’t going to be kept around.  The non-profit keeps changing entrance requirements in such a way as to preclude the poorest, worst prepared and most needy students from attending.  In contrast, the for-profit is focused on programs to HELP those students succeed.  You can argue (and I’m sure Harkin would) that the for-profit is doing it only to increase their bottom line, but the fact remains that they are graduating students who otherwise never would have made it.  Neither is as evil or as pure as comics like the one above would have you think.

So why do I still have that snobbish attitude?  My next week will be spent focusing on making this decision based on facts, not that attitude.  I need to look at what both jobs offer, where they could go, and which will provide a secure future for myself and my husband.

This attitude is why it takes so long to do even the most simple thing in a college or university.

(That high school C was a particularly traumatic experience that convinced me that I couldn’t do algebra.  I later made course choices based on that particular assumption that were less than optimal.)

I’m not going to be able to use that excuse much longer.  In preparation for Calculus this winter I’ve been reviewing algebra and trigonometry using a tool called ALEKS.  Aleks is an online tool for both K-12 and higher education.  It is a modestly adaptive tool that first gives you an assessment, then has you work through a series of exercises with explanations if you need them until you can do each problem type without help at least 3 times.

Realistically this is drill and practice work, but it doesn’t keep drilling you on concepts you’ve got.  That makes it useful for the time crunched (like me).

The tool has a monthly subscription option for people who want to learn on their own (19.99/month, which isn’t bad when you only need a month or so).  More important it has a course called “Prep for Calculus” that will allow a student to go through all of the standard prerequisites of calculus in an organized fashion.  It doesn’t require me to re-do the pieces I know and provides enough help on the ones I don’t to remind me about all the stuff I haven’t seen since 1983.

The best part for me is that my confidence is increasing as well.  As I work through the different sections I am remembering more and more.  I am getting back into the habit of doing math and working through a lot of example problems that I otherwise might not have spent the time on.  The tool breaks things down into small enough skills that I can master a few each day.  The next day it has you review them (ie do more problems and make sure you get them right) before letting you move on.  The result is that I remember more each day and am feeling better about what I do or don’t know.

If you are in the position of needing to refresh yourself on a topic or tutoring a struggling student who needs more help, take a look at ALEKS.  For the price I find it an excellent bargain and the right investment for me.