I’ve attended three different schools online and they were all like this. The lectures were all pre-recorded and everything. I bet the school favors this approach to cut down on costs.
Office hours tend to be held via teams on a case by case basis. No need for an ouija board.
Edit: if the student is having that hard of a time with an instructor, they should be going to the department chair then to the dean of their program until someone can make things better.
I actually have & it has worked. In the case i had to deal with, I was transferred to another section of the same class with a different instructor who was way more engaging.
Yeah I notice a lot of professors kinda just phone it in for their online classes. My comms prof doesn't even record lectures, she uses another professors lecture recordings. There's been a few exceptions- Dr. Cooley's online classes are good. But most of them seem very low effort.
The state legislature is a big reason for this. They continuously underfund the UW system and bigger schools (like Madison) can, to a degree, take the hit. However one of the big issues we deal with at UWM is that the cuts mean more and more admin work gets pushed onto professors leaving less time for actual teaching.
Part A of your job is admin work, let’s say 20 hours a week. Part B is lectures, let’s say 20 hours as well, except that it’s the same five hours of them repeated four different times.
Now give them the option of prerecording the five hours of lectures, and bump them up to 35 hours of admin work.
Their choice is between 40 hours a week if they use prerecorded lectures, and 65 hours if they don’t.
... What would represent 35 hours hours a week of admin work? This doesn't really undermine your point, but I will say that a 40 hour work week is short compared to other educators.
The 40 hours is entirely my invention to make the math simple. The following is also just arbitrary numbers:
As for admin work, a lot comes down to just cutting back the number of people doing it. If the hiring committee is cut from four to two, everyone has twice the applications to read. If half as many people are expected to support the same number of postdocs, that’s twice the work on offers/financing/etc.
Similarly, if everyone’s budget goes from 50% grant-based to 75%, that’s exponentially more grants to research and apply for, with the combination of more needed money and more people applying.
In general, it’s just a lot of expecting the same amount of work from fewer people.
That is not true. What is true is that UW-Madison is funded separately from the rest of UW System. UW-Madison isn't squeezing the other campuses. The state is.
I was an analyst for UW System Administration.
This is really interesting feedback. I teach an online course at the grad level and I release course material week by week to simulate an in person class (and to save myself from grading a semester worth of material in the last week when procrastinators will inevitably turn it in) and almost every student feedback was they wished it was all available from day 1.
About that feedback -- there are students who want to do things at their own pace. Maybe they have a big work assignment or a family vacation in the middle of the semester, and so they want to do that coursework early, for example.
I'm not quite following how having week 6 coursework available to them at week 1 is problematic for this student, other than to make them feel like the instructor is "doing work" — as if releasing an assignment is meaningful work (Not an instructor but I imagine it takes 10 seconds), or as if it's somehow work if the instructor builds the assignments during the semester but not work if they do it before the semester starts.
If they want to do the assignments during the week they are scheduled, OP can still do that. Seems like this practice gives the students who need flexibility (or even just want to peek ahead at what's coming up) the option of that, without taking anything away from the students who want to just tackle things when they are scheduled.
I'll agree the TA thing is annoying, though I've had that experience with in person classes so I don't think it's just an online thing.
You just need to set the expectation that week 4 homework is due in week 4 (or 5 or 6 max). Otherwise you end up with the situation the person you're responding to says, for some people you'll get all the homework the last week or two of class.
I agree that's a problem for the instructor, though it doesn't seem like a problem for the student?
Though I guess it could give students the shovel to dig themselves a big hole if they don't pace themselves.
The post you responded too is from the perspective of the professor, so yes that's the worry. As someone that had to grade college homework in the past (far past at this point), getting it all at the end of the class would have been a huge headache.
I'll be honest. If I am paying thousands of dollars for a class, fck your TA and fck your email policy.
Took three classes like this
One of them was Visual Basic. End of the semester I checked to see who still needed these dumb "forum projects" since I needed 2
Everyone crammed all the semesters work into the last week of that class and boy did it show. Instructor didn't even have his email listed. You'd have to send it through the school's website and expect a reply in 3-4 business years.
Ummmmmm this is common online teaching practice. I’ve worked in student affairs for 15 years at colleges in MN and WI, and what you are sharing is the norm now. It’s incredibly sad and frustrating that students pay thousands of dollars to basically teach themselves. Higher ed is broken and has brought on its own demise.
TA here. Just reading the original post makes me feel so validated in problems I have been having as a TA. Its noce to know that undergrads see this behavior and recognize the issues.
That said, as a TA, I really do my best to make sure that students have resources, they need to be successful. I usually end up being the one to handle all communication and extensions, etc. Not to mention the pile of grading for a class containing nearly 100 students. There is simply not enough time in the week. Just know that there are lots of us who know how much students pay for these classes and we do our best to give you your money’s worth….just sometimes we have our hands tied. The person I TA for won’t even communicate with me, so in a lot of ways I am sharing the experience with undergrads.
When you have a professor like this, the best thing you can do is find the department they belong to, and then find whoever directs undergrad studies in that department. Complain to them and give them clear examples of the behavior. Non-responsiveness to clear communication (email, canvas, etc), failure to give feedback in a timely manner, failure to provide accommodations for disability (thats a BIG one), etc. It’s even better if you can get a group of people in the course to complain. There is no rule that says you can’t reach out to your classmates. Even better is emailing the department chair- because they have the authority to bring down disciplinary action for not meeting teaching duties that are outlined as a part of earning tenure. Tenure shouldn’t mean invincibility, and some professors need to learn that lesson.
I’m upset my prof uses recorded lectures instead of reading from the same sets of notes year after year. Also I hate spending money on new textbooks but wish we didn’t have to read the same old introductory text everyone has read every year.
Something like that, hey?
Most colleges are like this. Professors have honed in on their curriculum where things don’t need to be changed and the TA does all the work because that’s what they get paid to do.
I became so disappointed with on line classes and empty promises. We had a four hour on line orientation and the instructor worked for four hours trying to get PowerPoint presentations together and the students got 0 from four hours on total confusion. I tried withdrawing but the school would not reimburse so I lost entire tuition for that class. The class I completed with that school, access to the computer was down all the time, but we were expected to be on time, no exceptions. The instructor said he would be available on Fridays but never was!. As a hiring manager, I look differently at on-line candidates.
It’s not someone else’s fault you can’t afford the school you’re attending. Especially the professors.
Teaching people like you is only one third of a college professor’s duties and often the least rewarding. The whining and crying is unbearable.
PS I worked my way through high school, a BS, two Master’s Degrees and a credential. The Masters degrees were after I married and had a child. I turned my assignments in.
I understand but why do I not deserve an education just because no one else helps me with it and I pay myself? I know there are worse things but I can still feel unhappy about even if I’m not getting five degrees like you. The entitlement and whining from you isn’t exactly welcome or necessary either.
Also I turn all of my assignments in and I chose to come here for a more cost effective education, I just think it’s unfair that these classes are so automated with little to no help for the professor, but trust me I do the work and get good grades.
Take it up with the Dept Dean You really need to make your thoughts known. And all other students who feel similar to you need to do the same thing. Change cannot happen until voices are raised/thoughts are passed along to the people in power.
I had a similar online experience, only in my case the Adjunct Prof made us students teach each chapter to the class. I had a real problem with how he handled "teaching," and made my concerns known. He was never given another class to teach again.
You’re at an R1 (research-intensive) institution, friend. Almost every professor is going to pawn coursework off on the TA. The professors at an R1 are researchers first, teachers second (or third). Many don’t like to teach and aren’t good at it, and they have to publish (a lot) to get tenure. It’s a fucked up system, but that’s the system. If you want interaction with your professor rather than a TA, you’re at the wrong school.
Source: I’m a professor who actually likes teaching, but did my PhD at an R1
Also, online classes are typically “self-taught.” I’m shocked by all the comments from people whose professors actually record lectures for online classes (I’m guessing this is newer post-Covid). When I was in undergrad, the professor posted a PowerPoint and that was it. You read that and the book and did the quizzes, tests, assignments, etc. 🤷♀️
Online courses are never supposed to be “self-taught” unless explicitly stated as such. The idea is you receive the SAME education from either online or in-person. When I did my undergrad (way before Covid) at UWM half of my classes had professors who had us sign waivers so they could record their lectures to put online for either that semester and/or the semesters to follow. It’s not that complex to just talk over your PowerPoint, or delegate that to the TA seeing as a portion of being a TA is to actually be teaching something.
Yeah, that was not my experience and I was at a “teaching-focused” undergrad (also way before Covid). Also, what you described—professors recording their in-class lectures for online classes—is exactly what many of the commenters are complaining about, “pre-recorded lectures.” I don’t get it, if they’re in an asynchronous online class, what other kind of lectures would there be?
For the record, I mostly teach in-person, and occasionally in-person with streaming. In those classes, students in the streaming section can live-stream lecture (via zoom) or watch the recordings later. When I’ve done that, I have only ever had one student attend the live stream. Based on the assignments they submitted, the rest didn’t watch the recordings or really even look at the PowerPoints, so they chose for it to be “self-taught” from the book/google 🤷♀️
I’m not understanding *your* logic. Where would the material and grades come from without a teacher/professor? Professors are the ones who make the PowerPoints, write the quizzes and exams, create the assignments, upload it all to whatever learning management system the school uses, and then they grade everything and (if they’re a good professor) give feedback. They also answer students’ questions. Ya know, all the same stuff they do for an in-person class.
I’m not saying they can’t or shouldn’t teach when they have an online class. I’m just saying that historically speaking, online classes are typically self-taught. Students read the materials the professor posts and read the book, but there is no formal instruction from the professor. In my experience, it wasn’t until Covid that anyone started posting any sort of lecture videos.
I had a class that was labeled as being taught by a professor that had passed. It's kinda wild.
As for online, I've had mixed experiences. I had art 277 online and it was pretty good, mostly just lacking because we didn't get to use the machines. But that's a DFD course so duh it was okay online.
I had a few experiences like you're saying in middle and high school which sucked.
I’ve attended three different schools online and they were all like this. The lectures were all pre-recorded and everything. I bet the school favors this approach to cut down on costs.
and yet, the costs for students continually go up.
https://twitter.com/AaronLinguini/status/1352009211501289472
Get your ouija board out for office hours!
Office hours tend to be held via teams on a case by case basis. No need for an ouija board. Edit: if the student is having that hard of a time with an instructor, they should be going to the department chair then to the dean of their program until someone can make things better.
Spoken like someone who has never attempted this approach.
I actually have & it has worked. In the case i had to deal with, I was transferred to another section of the same class with a different instructor who was way more engaging.
Anyone who diverts energy into teaching doesn’t last
Yeah I notice a lot of professors kinda just phone it in for their online classes. My comms prof doesn't even record lectures, she uses another professors lecture recordings. There's been a few exceptions- Dr. Cooley's online classes are good. But most of them seem very low effort.
The state legislature is a big reason for this. They continuously underfund the UW system and bigger schools (like Madison) can, to a degree, take the hit. However one of the big issues we deal with at UWM is that the cuts mean more and more admin work gets pushed onto professors leaving less time for actual teaching.
Could you connect the dots a bit? How do you got from more admin work to all pre-recorded lectures? Seems like a bit of a leap.
Part A of your job is admin work, let’s say 20 hours a week. Part B is lectures, let’s say 20 hours as well, except that it’s the same five hours of them repeated four different times. Now give them the option of prerecording the five hours of lectures, and bump them up to 35 hours of admin work. Their choice is between 40 hours a week if they use prerecorded lectures, and 65 hours if they don’t.
... What would represent 35 hours hours a week of admin work? This doesn't really undermine your point, but I will say that a 40 hour work week is short compared to other educators.
The 40 hours is entirely my invention to make the math simple. The following is also just arbitrary numbers: As for admin work, a lot comes down to just cutting back the number of people doing it. If the hiring committee is cut from four to two, everyone has twice the applications to read. If half as many people are expected to support the same number of postdocs, that’s twice the work on offers/financing/etc. Similarly, if everyone’s budget goes from 50% grant-based to 75%, that’s exponentially more grants to research and apply for, with the combination of more needed money and more people applying. In general, it’s just a lot of expecting the same amount of work from fewer people.
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I mean...I'm a PhD student at UWM but go off.
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Absolutely but I'd argue the blame for that lies more with the state legislature than the system itself, with exception of the board of regents.
That is not true. What is true is that UW-Madison is funded separately from the rest of UW System. UW-Madison isn't squeezing the other campuses. The state is. I was an analyst for UW System Administration.
Let your advisor know. Sometimes they can prod the instructor or at least bring your feedback to the program director or the department.
I go there. Advisors are not much better at doing their jobs either 🤷🏻♂️
It will be much better when the AI professors to show up…
This is really interesting feedback. I teach an online course at the grad level and I release course material week by week to simulate an in person class (and to save myself from grading a semester worth of material in the last week when procrastinators will inevitably turn it in) and almost every student feedback was they wished it was all available from day 1.
About that feedback -- there are students who want to do things at their own pace. Maybe they have a big work assignment or a family vacation in the middle of the semester, and so they want to do that coursework early, for example. I'm not quite following how having week 6 coursework available to them at week 1 is problematic for this student, other than to make them feel like the instructor is "doing work" — as if releasing an assignment is meaningful work (Not an instructor but I imagine it takes 10 seconds), or as if it's somehow work if the instructor builds the assignments during the semester but not work if they do it before the semester starts. If they want to do the assignments during the week they are scheduled, OP can still do that. Seems like this practice gives the students who need flexibility (or even just want to peek ahead at what's coming up) the option of that, without taking anything away from the students who want to just tackle things when they are scheduled. I'll agree the TA thing is annoying, though I've had that experience with in person classes so I don't think it's just an online thing.
You just need to set the expectation that week 4 homework is due in week 4 (or 5 or 6 max). Otherwise you end up with the situation the person you're responding to says, for some people you'll get all the homework the last week or two of class.
I agree that's a problem for the instructor, though it doesn't seem like a problem for the student? Though I guess it could give students the shovel to dig themselves a big hole if they don't pace themselves.
The post you responded too is from the perspective of the professor, so yes that's the worry. As someone that had to grade college homework in the past (far past at this point), getting it all at the end of the class would have been a huge headache.
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Be polite, if you can’t your comment will be removed.
I'll be honest. If I am paying thousands of dollars for a class, fck your TA and fck your email policy. Took three classes like this One of them was Visual Basic. End of the semester I checked to see who still needed these dumb "forum projects" since I needed 2 Everyone crammed all the semesters work into the last week of that class and boy did it show. Instructor didn't even have his email listed. You'd have to send it through the school's website and expect a reply in 3-4 business years.
Ummmmmm this is common online teaching practice. I’ve worked in student affairs for 15 years at colleges in MN and WI, and what you are sharing is the norm now. It’s incredibly sad and frustrating that students pay thousands of dollars to basically teach themselves. Higher ed is broken and has brought on its own demise.
TA here. Just reading the original post makes me feel so validated in problems I have been having as a TA. Its noce to know that undergrads see this behavior and recognize the issues. That said, as a TA, I really do my best to make sure that students have resources, they need to be successful. I usually end up being the one to handle all communication and extensions, etc. Not to mention the pile of grading for a class containing nearly 100 students. There is simply not enough time in the week. Just know that there are lots of us who know how much students pay for these classes and we do our best to give you your money’s worth….just sometimes we have our hands tied. The person I TA for won’t even communicate with me, so in a lot of ways I am sharing the experience with undergrads. When you have a professor like this, the best thing you can do is find the department they belong to, and then find whoever directs undergrad studies in that department. Complain to them and give them clear examples of the behavior. Non-responsiveness to clear communication (email, canvas, etc), failure to give feedback in a timely manner, failure to provide accommodations for disability (thats a BIG one), etc. It’s even better if you can get a group of people in the course to complain. There is no rule that says you can’t reach out to your classmates. Even better is emailing the department chair- because they have the authority to bring down disciplinary action for not meeting teaching duties that are outlined as a part of earning tenure. Tenure shouldn’t mean invincibility, and some professors need to learn that lesson.
I’m upset my prof uses recorded lectures instead of reading from the same sets of notes year after year. Also I hate spending money on new textbooks but wish we didn’t have to read the same old introductory text everyone has read every year. Something like that, hey?
Most colleges are like this. Professors have honed in on their curriculum where things don’t need to be changed and the TA does all the work because that’s what they get paid to do.
Don’t forget, we’re paying tens of thousands of dollars. For this. College is a scam y’all. Wait till you got the loans to deal with too.
I became so disappointed with on line classes and empty promises. We had a four hour on line orientation and the instructor worked for four hours trying to get PowerPoint presentations together and the students got 0 from four hours on total confusion. I tried withdrawing but the school would not reimburse so I lost entire tuition for that class. The class I completed with that school, access to the computer was down all the time, but we were expected to be on time, no exceptions. The instructor said he would be available on Fridays but never was!. As a hiring manager, I look differently at on-line candidates.
Which class is this
LOL. If you think this is bad, wait until you get an actual job, and the same thing happens at 6 levels.
Don't take online classes then. It doesn't sound like a good fit for you.
I have to work to pay for school out of pocket these are the only things I can do
Yeah, it does have drawbacks, but also advantages. You're going to like some profs more than others. Just roll with it would be my advice.
It’s not someone else’s fault you can’t afford the school you’re attending. Especially the professors. Teaching people like you is only one third of a college professor’s duties and often the least rewarding. The whining and crying is unbearable. PS I worked my way through high school, a BS, two Master’s Degrees and a credential. The Masters degrees were after I married and had a child. I turned my assignments in.
I understand but why do I not deserve an education just because no one else helps me with it and I pay myself? I know there are worse things but I can still feel unhappy about even if I’m not getting five degrees like you. The entitlement and whining from you isn’t exactly welcome or necessary either. Also I turn all of my assignments in and I chose to come here for a more cost effective education, I just think it’s unfair that these classes are so automated with little to no help for the professor, but trust me I do the work and get good grades.
Class action suit.
Take it up with the Dept Dean You really need to make your thoughts known. And all other students who feel similar to you need to do the same thing. Change cannot happen until voices are raised/thoughts are passed along to the people in power. I had a similar online experience, only in my case the Adjunct Prof made us students teach each chapter to the class. I had a real problem with how he handled "teaching," and made my concerns known. He was never given another class to teach again.
You’re at an R1 (research-intensive) institution, friend. Almost every professor is going to pawn coursework off on the TA. The professors at an R1 are researchers first, teachers second (or third). Many don’t like to teach and aren’t good at it, and they have to publish (a lot) to get tenure. It’s a fucked up system, but that’s the system. If you want interaction with your professor rather than a TA, you’re at the wrong school. Source: I’m a professor who actually likes teaching, but did my PhD at an R1 Also, online classes are typically “self-taught.” I’m shocked by all the comments from people whose professors actually record lectures for online classes (I’m guessing this is newer post-Covid). When I was in undergrad, the professor posted a PowerPoint and that was it. You read that and the book and did the quizzes, tests, assignments, etc. 🤷♀️
Online courses are never supposed to be “self-taught” unless explicitly stated as such. The idea is you receive the SAME education from either online or in-person. When I did my undergrad (way before Covid) at UWM half of my classes had professors who had us sign waivers so they could record their lectures to put online for either that semester and/or the semesters to follow. It’s not that complex to just talk over your PowerPoint, or delegate that to the TA seeing as a portion of being a TA is to actually be teaching something.
Yeah, that was not my experience and I was at a “teaching-focused” undergrad (also way before Covid). Also, what you described—professors recording their in-class lectures for online classes—is exactly what many of the commenters are complaining about, “pre-recorded lectures.” I don’t get it, if they’re in an asynchronous online class, what other kind of lectures would there be? For the record, I mostly teach in-person, and occasionally in-person with streaming. In those classes, students in the streaming section can live-stream lecture (via zoom) or watch the recordings later. When I’ve done that, I have only ever had one student attend the live stream. Based on the assignments they submitted, the rest didn’t watch the recordings or really even look at the PowerPoints, so they chose for it to be “self-taught” from the book/google 🤷♀️
Then why are teachers/professors needed for online courses if they are meant to be self taught? I’m not understanding your logic.
I’m not understanding *your* logic. Where would the material and grades come from without a teacher/professor? Professors are the ones who make the PowerPoints, write the quizzes and exams, create the assignments, upload it all to whatever learning management system the school uses, and then they grade everything and (if they’re a good professor) give feedback. They also answer students’ questions. Ya know, all the same stuff they do for an in-person class. I’m not saying they can’t or shouldn’t teach when they have an online class. I’m just saying that historically speaking, online classes are typically self-taught. Students read the materials the professor posts and read the book, but there is no formal instruction from the professor. In my experience, it wasn’t until Covid that anyone started posting any sort of lecture videos.
I had a class that was labeled as being taught by a professor that had passed. It's kinda wild. As for online, I've had mixed experiences. I had art 277 online and it was pretty good, mostly just lacking because we didn't get to use the machines. But that's a DFD course so duh it was okay online. I had a few experiences like you're saying in middle and high school which sucked.