Serendipity35

I recently read a very strong opinion piece by Kevin Birmingham on what he calls "The Great Shame of Our Profession" - how the humanities survive on the exploitation of adjunct faculty. Birmingham spoke at a ceremony last October for winning the Truman Capote Award for his book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses . Though the audience expected a talk on literary criticism, what they got was criticism of another kind. Though he writes from the perspective of someone teaching in th humanities, this situation crosses over into all departments.

It is the Sisyphean plight of adjunct faculty trying to cobble together a "full time" academic career from a part time profession.

An excerpt:

"...I am one of over one million non-tenure-track instructors working on a temporary or contingent basis and whose position offers no possibility of tenure. To be contingent means not to know if you’ll be teaching next semester or if your class will be canceled days before it starts. Most adjuncts receive less than three weeks’ notice of an appointment. They rarely receive benefits and have virtually no say in university governance... Tenured faculty represent only 17 percent of college instructors. Part-time adjuncts are now the majority of the professoriate and its fastest-growing segment. From 1975 to 2011, the number of part-time adjuncts quadrupled. And the so-called part-time designation is misleading because most of them are piecing together teaching jobs at multiple institutions simultaneously. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89 percent of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13 percent work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any one of them pays. In 2013, The Chronicle began collecting data on salary and benefits from adjuncts across the country... According to the 2014 congressional report, adjuncts’ median pay per course is $2,700. An annual report by the American Association of University Professors indicated that last year "the average part-time faculty member earned $16,718" from a single employer. Other studies have similar findings. Thirty-one percent of part-time faculty members live near or below the poverty line. Twenty-five percent receive public assistance, like Medicaid or food stamps. One English-department adjunct who responded to the survey said that she sold her plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pay for her daughter’s day care. Another woman stated that she taught four classes a year for less than $10,000... Sixty-one percent of adjunct faculty are women."

As you hear more about the Internet of Things (IoT), you may hear that the S in IoT stands for "security."

Right, there is no S in IoT. That's the point.

Did you know that today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day? Data Privacy Day (known in Europe as Data Protection Day) is an international holiday that occurs every 28 January.

The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. It is currently observed in the United States, Canada, India and 47 European countries.

There's probably a lot more of your information in cyberspace than you know. And new devices are collecting more of your data every day. 

StaySafeOnline.org is just one site that has information about data privacy.

As an educator, if you want to teach about this to kids in elementary school, middle and high school or to students in higher education, they have materials.

Of course, this is not just for students. Many adults, especially older adults who didn't grow up with or use technology in their working lives, lack some basic knowledge about protecting your personal data. 

One slice of this data pie is privacy in social networks. Those networks both you use the data you voluntarily supply them with about yourself (birth date, address, email, occupation) and also information that you "allow" them to collect (perhaps without knowing that you allow them to gather that data) such as who your friends are, where you work, schools you attended, locations you frequent, your mobile phone number etc.).

Your smartphone, tablet or laptop  contains significant information about you and your friends and family – contact numbers, photos, more locations and more. How many security settings have you changed on your devices? If you're like many people, the answer is either none or "There are security settings?" Your mobile devices need to be protected.

Today might be a good day to start or check again just how much you have done to protect your personal privacy and data.

Soon, even more "things" connected to the Internet in your home, car, office and the places around you will be adding to that personal data out there. Be ready!

 



StaySafeOnline1 is the official YouTube channel of the National Cyber Security Alliance. NCSA's mission is to educate and therefore empower a digital society to use the Internet safely and securely at home, work, and school, protecting the technology individuals use, the networks they connect to, and our shared digital assets.

Quick follow-up to yesterday's post about non-traditional students online.



I came across a Tweet that led me to a blog post saying "There are no more traditional college students." The post was actually about "student recruitment strategies" but it gets into the "shifting demographics of today’s college student, particularly as the 'non-traditional' adult learner becomes the new norm" which is something I also addressed in my earlier post.

The author is considering that there no longer is a typical or “traditional” college student because in recruiting a "one-size fits all messaging strategy will not work."

The article looks at doing some research schools need to do to determine of your potential audience: Who are they? What motivates them? and Where can you reach them? 

Certainly the first two questions are relevant to those of us already teaching them. And if you change the third question to HOW can you reach them? it is very important too.

I was curious to look at this study that analyzes nontraditional students' perceptions of online course quality and what they "value." The authors categorized students into three groups: traditional, moderately nontraditional, and highly nontraditional. Those distinctions are what initially got my attention.

I hear more and more about "nontraditional students" to the degree that I'm beginning to believe that like any minority they will become a majority and then be what is "traditional." For years, I have been reading and experiencing the decline of traditional students who graduated high school and went immediately on to attend a four-year college, full time and with the majority living on campus. They are an endangered species - and that scares many schools.

In this study, they say that "There is no precise definition for nontraditional students in higher education, though there are several characteristics that are commonly used to identify individuals labeled as nontraditional.  A study by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2002), identified nontraditional students as individuals who meet at least one of the following qualifiers: delays enrollment, attends part-time for at least part of the academic year, works full-time, is considered financially independent in relation to financial aid eligibility, has dependents other than a spouse, is a single parent, or does not have a high school diploma.  Horn (1996) characterized the “nontraditional-ness” of students on a continuum depending on how many of these criteria individuals meet.  In this study, respondents’ age, dependents, employment status and student status are used to define nontraditional students."

Two-year schools as a degree and job path, part-time students working full-time, older students returning to education and other "non-traditional" sources of learning (for-profits, training centers, alternative degrees, MOOCs) have all made many students "non-traditional." Some people have talked about the increasing number of "non-students" who are utilizing online training without any intention of getting credits or a certificate or degree.

The things the non-traditional students in the study value are not surprising: clear instructions on how to get started, clear assessment criteria, and access to technical support if something goes wrong. How different from the traditional students would that be?

The conclusions of the study suggest that "nontraditional students differ from more traditional students in their perceptions of quality in online courses," but they also say that "All students place great importance on having clear statements and guidelines related to how their work will be assessed." The overlap is that students always want to know "what they need to do in order to get an A."

One belief of the authors that I have observed for my 16 years of teaching online is that non-traditional students (no matter how we define them) have "multiple responsibilities and they need to ensure that the time spent on their coursework is beneficial and productive." As teachers, we would hope that this is true of all our students, even the very traditional ones who may have fewer concerns and responsibilities that are non-academic.

As a teacher or instructional designer, this reinforces the ideas that they need courses to be: well-designed, consistently presented, easily navigable, appropriately aligned, with clearly stated expectations, and information about how to and who to contact when they encounter challenges to learning. In that sense, we are all non-traditional.