TAing with Confidence

Thursday, February 23, 2017
Online Learning Lab, Building 10, Room 1102
CLICK AND REGISTER

This seminar offers strategies for planning/leading discussions and break-out sessions, and provides a chance to connect with other University TAs. This session will be presented by Dr. Brandi Denison, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, a Faculty Fellow in the Office of Faculty Enhancement.

Thursday, February 23, 2017
Online Learning Lab, Building 10, Room 1102
CLICK AND REGISTER

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Transgender Inclusion in the Classroom

The LGBT Center will be hosting a faculty and student panel titled:
Transgender Inclusion: Policies and Practice in the Classroom

The panel will include faculty, student, and staff perspectives on practices in the classroom that lead to transgender inclusion. The panel will discuss new guidelines on preferred name use.
See the event description provided by the LGBT Center below.


Transgender Inclusion: Policies and Practice in the Classroom
Faculty, staff and students are invited to a panel discussion about policies and practices that create an inclusive campus for transgender students. Topics will include best practices in the classroom, the experiences of current transgender students, and an introduction to the new UNF Preferred Name Policy. Panelists include Dr. Nick de Villiers (College of Arts & Sciences), Andrea Adams-Manning (Student Ombuds and Assistant Dean of Students), and student Bane Campos. Kaitlin Legg (LGBT Resource Center) will facilitate the discussion.
More information: see the event facebook page.

How Well Do You Know Your Class Workloads?

Photo by Steve Corey

For many professors, it is difficult to gauge how much time their students spend on assigned tasks outside of class. How long does it take a student to read 30 pages from a textbook? Two scientific journal articles? How long would it take a student to write a 5-page, double-spaced article summary? With these difficulties in mind, two professors from Rice University have developed the Course Workload Estimator. This tool allows an instructor to enter the specifics of assignments given to students and to determine the estimated weekly workload.

We gave the estimator a try using an old syllabus from a 3-credit College Algebra course. The class had 4 exams (one of which was cumulative), approximately 20 pages of assigned reading from a textbook per week, and 50 other assignments (25 online homework assignments and 25 online quizzes). Entering this information yielded an estimated workload of 10.1 hours per week, slightly more than 3 hours of study per hour spent in class.

Although it varies by professor, most faculty members try to give students 3 to 5 hours of outside classwork per hour of class. For example, if a student is taking 12 credit hours, she would need to study somewhere between 36 and 60 hours per week in order to keep up.

Unfortunately, there is a substantial gap between teacher expectations and actual student behavior. According to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data, UNF students report studying between 1 and 1.5 hours per credit hour weekly. Thus, the student taking 12 credit hours, would only study 12 to 18 hours per week, instead of the expected 36 to 60 hours.

Recent research has shown, however, that time spent studying is not, in and of itself, a reliable predictor of academic performance in college (Nonis & Hudson, 2006; Plant, Ericsson, Hill, & Asberg, 2004). Rather, time spent studying interacts with other factors, including ability, motivation, and the quality of studying environment, to predict academic performance. The Course Workload Estimator could be a good starting point for translating your class content into clear time-commitment expectations for your students, but more studying does not necessarily mean higher performance. It seems that course workload is no substitute for good course design and planning.

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The Shared Benefits of a College Degree

Publicly-funded education has long been considered integral to the health of our country. In 1822, James Madison noted, “learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.” He goes on to advocate for public funding of education as a path towards equal opportunity, noting “Without such Institutions, the more costly of which can scarcely be provided by individual means, none but the few whose wealth enables them to support their sons abroad can give them the fullest education… At cheaper & nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest.”

How has public funding for Florida colleges fared in the past decade? According to a recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, state funding has been cut 22.7% since 2008, a reduction of $2,132 per student (a glimmer of hope is that since 2015, Florida has increased funding 3.5%, or $244 per student). As a result of public finding cuts, institutions have been forced to raise tuition costs. Indeed, Florida’s universities increased tuition costs by an average of 64.3% between 2008 and 2016, a hike of $2,490 per student. Florida is not unique in this, and these data point to a worrying national trend in higher education: less state funding and more reliance on students to carry the load of the cost of college education – many by taking on substantial student loan debt.

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Philip Trostel argues that making cuts to higher education is easier when law-makers emphasize private, individual benefits of a college education (e.g., higher annual and lifetime income, longer life expectancy, more access to higher-quality healthcare, higher retirement accounts). When the value of higher education is framed on these individual benefits, law-makers and citizens alike often exclude discussions of the larger societal goods that result from higher education. Trostel argues that the notion of an educated populace as a public good has been completely omitted. With that omission, and the prevailing notion that private goods are best served by private means, financing of higher education has been deemed better-served by the free market, and not by public funding of universities.

Making higher education out of reach for those, as Madison suggests, with "slender incomes" has the consequence of inadvertently diminishing the "public mind" and threatening "public liberty." Shifting the narrative of the benefits of college education away from private gains to public gains might not change much in the short term. Over time, focusing on the shared social goods a society receives from college graduates can bring wider support for more public funding to achieve those aims, supporting a public that is ready to defend their public liberties.

By Greg Rousis

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