Hello Belle,
Now that I have had adequate time to read over your e-mail, some of it I can respond to
and some of it is not mine to address, that is the reason for the meeting with Gary.
The following paragraph I will address below:
There is no structured way within the CIS Department to develop redundancy and
longevity in maintenance of teaching curriculum. Currently, certain courses are given to
instructors offering no cross-training and overlap. Currently if an instructor had to leave,
there would be no one to cover down on their courses. There are no scheduled
coordination meetings, and you regularly leave around 3:30 PM many times creating
additional requirements for advising students that other instructors attempt to cover down
on, but really are issues for you to resolve. Another issue is that Adjunct faculty is not
being supervised at night. We have adjunct faculty teaching online classes that have
stated “I have to work 60hrs a week, I don’t have time to develop this course from
scratch”. Yet we still allow adjunct faculty to teach this course.
I have never stood in the way of anyone wanting to cross-train, some of the instructors
did that with Cisco 1 & 2, but I will also not mandate cross-training. Forcing someone to
learn something they are not interested in learning is a losing proposition. If any one of
the instructors wishes to learn another topic, I would never stand in their way. Over the
years, we have had instructors leave suddenly and have always found someone to pick up
where they left off and have done a wonderful job.
My office hours are posted and if a student comes after I have left for the day, they are
always welcome to come back during those times. If advising students is not something
you wish to do or have time to do, just ask them to return during my posted office hours.
Some days I do leave at 3:30, but there are also many more when I leave at 4:30 or 4:45.
I also return after 5 to advise students when the have called and let me know they cannot
meet during my office hours.
The adjunct faculty member mentioned above had taught the class in question on the
internet for many semesters and had done an excellent job. This statement was made
after the spring 2003 semester started and the book had been changed a couple of times.
This instructor had already put in many hours of work on the class for this semester. For
the summer semester, one of our full-time instructors is teaching this class.
Talma