Figured it out

I admit, a lot of what I said and felt on Tuesday was an over-reaction. In short, what happened was this: the CMS (course-management software: we use BlackBoard, but there are better ones out there, I think) pages were set up for my classes. I was not consulted on what I wanted beyond "do you want an 'empty shell' or do you want a previous semester's stuff copied?"

In the past, I asked for an 'empty shell' and that is pretty much what I got: I could then fill it in as I wanted. Yes, last semester they started including "nudges" like a "meet your professor" section where you were asked to provide a biography (and my reaction was, "Heck, they can 'meet' me on the first day of class" - you have to be already enrolled in the class to see this section so it's not as if someone will read whatever short bio I put up and decide to take my class).

I'm sure that was more for the people who teach exclusively online, but I teach exclusively face-to-face. So, okay, fine, I deleted that stuff and put up my own materials.

Well, one of my colleagues came to me earlier this summer (I guess he was setting stuff up early; he's out because his daughter is having her first child or something) and complained that they had put up "week by week" sections and I kind of groaned inwardly and told him (because he was vocally unhappy and angry) that we could always delete, they couldn't force us to fit some schedule. And apparently it was done for just the classes they assumed were online? Or at least that was what I heard.

Tuesday, I opened my intro bio class - yup, there were sixteen weekly "adaptive release" folders there, like an online class would have. I sighed: okay, fine. We use online homeworks (over my vocal protest that expecting the students to buy online access, given our student body's finances, seems excessive). And I set to deleting and fixing.

("Adaptive release," I presume, means "a module rolls out every week whether you're ready or not." When you're doing face-to-face classes where there's discussion, or people may struggle with a topic so you need to take more time on some things - well, the syllabus schedule, as I say on there, is "subject to change" so adaptive release feels too rigid*)

Fine, no harm, no foul.

Went to my ecology class.....wait, there are the sixteen weekly folders there....

(In ecology, some topics take three weeks and I am not going to stop and figure out breakpoints just so I can shoehorn them into the weeks).

Biostats? Same.

Policy and Law? Same. AND I have both an undergrad and a graduate section, so that means two pages to deal with. (ARGH. I have one grad student in there so I guess I make a whole BlackBoard page just for one person)


(*And if *I'M* declaring something "too rigid," that thing is pretty darn rigid, because the stereotypically-Prussian part of me comes out with any planning and scheduling)


So yeah. I had FIVE PAGES ("FIVE! PAGES! AHHAHAAHAHA! THUNDERCLAP!) to delete all that stuff on, and of course BlackBoard, like any software, stops before doing any action you request to ask you if it's "Okay."

(OKAY YES DAMMIT BLACKBOARD). And I could find no "batch delete" for those sixteen weeks....no way to highlight all of them and delete all at once....so that meant I had to do, what, 80 rounds of "I want to delete this folder" "Are you SURE" "YES I AM SURE")

And it was frustrating as heck, because that's time I could be doing other things.

And at the time, I felt sad and angry and beleaguered: "Of course they're doing it to us like this. Either they want us all to capitulate and go all-online, or they're going to make it so uncomfortable for the face-to-face people that we either quit and get replaced by adjuncts who are happy to teach online because it means they can do that while they drive for Uber and do their third job as well, or they're trying to force us into the online model"

And because I brood on things when I'm alone (and I was, on Tuesday) - "How many more semesters can I keep this up before I'm offered the choice: teach entirely online or be unemployed" and then I also thought of the Former Governor who is proposing a Battle Royale between the regionals, where maybe one or two will be left, or, heck, maybe we just force OU and OSU to lower their admissions standards 'cos they're the only schools we really care about, so kids can either go there or not go to college, and....

Yeah.

So I thought Very Bleak Thoughts as I sat at my desk. Wondered once again if the Choctaw Nation would employ someone to do environmental work for them who had no Native heritage. (They probably would, but IDK for sure - I know someone who works for them in that capacity but I'm pretty sure he has some Choctaw heritage). Wondered how many months' worth of food I could buy if I sold my piano. You can see where my head was at.

It's probably....not so bad.

For one thing, we're better off (enrollment wise, and probably financially) than many of the regionals, so MAYBE we'd survive a Battle Royale (though then again: we don't have any Representatives that I think would be willing to advocate for us, and that might be what it would take)

But in the Morning of All Meetings, I learned: there are some in higher offices on campus who are still committed to the face-to-face concept. And maybe things aren't so bad. Oh, I think some of the groups on campus that have lobbying power need to go to the tech office and tell them to give faculty MORE options as to what they want on a BlackBoard page, and not default to the model used in online classes when the class is clearly face-to-face. And my workaround for next semester is going to be having them copy this semester's classes (or, for the case of Soils', last year's) and then I can just go and sub in the stuff I changed. (And even though it's a pain: I could just make stuff "not active" and activate things as we get to it. I think that's part of the way you avoid mass class-skipping is by not handing people everything on the first day)

But I dunno. I will say there seem to be an awful lot of things around here where faculty have to put in extra work because someone somewhere in an office doesn't feel like asking us how we actually want things done, so we have to go back and correct things. I don't think now that it was outright maliciousness; it was either (a) laziness or (b) ignorance, believing "of course all faculty want this"

Though I will say I have seen a strain of thought around techie types that goes "We know better than what the end user does; what they want is silly so we should give them what we think is good for them instead" and that's just super annoying.

I finally got around to the point of not being despairing but being angry about it, and as I winnowed out all the stupid adaptive-release-weeks, I thought of something I read once. I think it was a (slightly comic) letter-to-the-editor of a newspaper, in Britain, during WWII: the woman writing it was complaining about the "National Loaf" (a rather coarse wholemeal loaf) and she said she had "sieved all the nasty vitamins out of it and fed them to the birds" and thinking about that - and viewing my taking away of the forced "adaptive releases" in the same spirit - one of "You think you know what's good for me but you really don't" and changing it the way I want it.