As I am about to retire, I have no dog in this hunt. However, my college seems hellbent on increasing teaching loads across the faculty and penalizing smaller classes by saying they will be worth .5 of a class with 10+ students. (This seems particularly directed against our language faculty.) I don’t expect there would be much buy-in for your good ideas here, alas, Tim—certainly not by the administration. Now, if my colleagues agreed to do it as a free overload…
1) You're absolutely right about the lawyers and accreditation, although maybe accrediting agencies could take a back seat or the Education Department could signal some acceptance of "these unprecedented times". I'm deeply perturbed by how little official recognition we've had since the spring of 2020 that we've been running colleges on a worse-than-wartime basis.
2) There's a whole host of soft skills that have been lost. I've never had more than one or two students ask how to buy textbooks...until this term. The entire concept of para-academic skills like knowing where books are kept and what a syllabus is and what classroom expectations are have been nuked.
As I am about to retire, I have no dog in this hunt. However, my college seems hellbent on increasing teaching loads across the faculty and penalizing smaller classes by saying they will be worth .5 of a class with 10+ students. (This seems particularly directed against our language faculty.) I don’t expect there would be much buy-in for your good ideas here, alas, Tim—certainly not by the administration. Now, if my colleagues agreed to do it as a free overload…
1) You're absolutely right about the lawyers and accreditation, although maybe accrediting agencies could take a back seat or the Education Department could signal some acceptance of "these unprecedented times". I'm deeply perturbed by how little official recognition we've had since the spring of 2020 that we've been running colleges on a worse-than-wartime basis.
2) There's a whole host of soft skills that have been lost. I've never had more than one or two students ask how to buy textbooks...until this term. The entire concept of para-academic skills like knowing where books are kept and what a syllabus is and what classroom expectations are have been nuked.