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James

James' Story

A real story contributed to this discuss.

James and a colleague created a format for Spanish 101 to be done online about 4 years ago. They basically just streamlined the book that we use in the traditional 101 classroom and created a syllabus, plus some listening / oral exercises /exams so students could access them through Blackboard, a web teaching shell used by the university. He taught the course through the shell and characterized it as being more like distance learning than the traditional classroom.

When he came up for promotion and tenure last year, he put the creation of the online course in the "Professional Development" category, rather than teaching.

It was placed in Professional Development because creating and teaching the Spanish 101 online course was considered an overload of regular duties, according to his contract. While it was teaching, since it fell within the boundaries of a separate College which runs the online courses, and not within the liberal arts college, he could not include it under teaching for tenure and promotion. Professional Development is a category for promotion and tenure includes areas of academia which will ideally improve him as an educator and scholar, but which are not his principle duties as defined by his contract. Thus, the work did not weigh as heavily for tenure and promotion, again, according to his contract. In terms of worth, he did it mainly for financial reasons, but also to get some experience working in an online format, which, as recent trends go, seems to be a very popular way of offering classes to non-traditional students, and one which will grow significantly in the future. So, for someone like him, who was not hired principally to teach an online course (since one did not exist when he was hired), it was not counted heavily in the decision to grant him tenure. He thinks that for future Ph.D.s and Departments, it should be weighted more heavily and be considered a "substitute" category for tenure and promotion criteria. That way, those professors who wish to develop this mode of instruction can dedicate a significant amount of time an energy to it, knowing that it will count toward their tenure and promotion status in the future.

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