Amy Hale: Academic Mercenary

I just returned from a really massive academic conference, you know the type where there are thousands and thousands of people, hundreds of panels, people trying to get jobs, find places to publish, and make fabulous professional connections.  These events feel like part intellectual hotbed, part meat market.  I had the opportunity to meet some wonderful people in my field, and in general experience a type of collegiality that I have not encountered in a number of years. Mission accomplished! I left the conference generally feeling excited and renewed, but these events also make me feel a bit introspective, and get me considering my own nonstandard academic career path and trajectory.  When meeting academic colleagues for the first time, I get the standard rota of questions:  “So, where do you teach?  What do you teach?” and then the inevitable follow ups “You teach for how many schools?  How do you do that?”  (By the way, I’m happy to offer workshops or consultations on these and other topics!) The response to my online specialization ranges from “Wow, that’s really cool!” to almost pitying responses from people who assume that I either gave up, or I must genuinely be wanting that tenure track position.  What is also clear to me, based on comments made by some colleagues, is that online teaching is not considered a respectable profession, and there is still clearly a lot of hostility and resistance to online teaching among classroom based professors.  In some ways I can understand this, and that will be a subject of another blog post, because it really needs addressing, but what I really wanted to write about today is how events like this prompt me to think about my life and my values as a teacher, academic, and researcher, and to reflect on my continuing engagement with traditional academia.

While I take great inspiration from my traditional colleagues, and I’m always excited to have the opportunity to exchange ideas with them and to start new projects, in many ways my life just does not look like theirs, except for the endless rounds of grading papers, and student interactions, which are just as real, inspiring, challenging and also as heartbreaking online as they are in the face to face environment.  I actually find that a lot of my day to day inspiration and motivation comes from the writings of people who consider themselves to be “lifestyle hackers”, those who live outside the box, and who conceive of of their lives and income streams in much more radical ways.  I’m thinking of The 4 Hour Workweek (not without problems, just sayin’!!) and The Art of Non Conformity, but there are many others. Please feel free to share your favorites with me.

In the past week or so I have been particularly inspired by the notion of the “portfolio life”, which is the idea that we start to see ourselves less as “having jobs” and more as possessing a variety of skills and interests that we can add to our portfolio. We can use our portfolio for marketing ourselves and also for making decisions on how we want to spend our time and resources.  Portfolio lives also require knowing what resources you need, because the income streams are seen less as an identity anchor and more of a way to finance how you want to live.  Although the portfolio life is frequently used to promote active retirement, I think there are plenty of ways for those of us not working 9 to 5 jobs to use this idea to use this concept to consider a more integrated life that is less defined by our jobs, and more defined by what we love. For people not engaged in standard employment, or do not have a single institution based position, this can be a very empowering life reframing exercise.

I want to concentrate on the different ways in which pieces of my life work together, some of which are career focused, some of which are not. I really don’t identify myself as an “adjunct professor”. Mostly I frame my career activities in a much more entrepreneurial space. I teach, I design, I consult. I have a number of different income streams that allow me the flexibility to travel, research, write and sing. Certainly there are many tech and business people who have this kind of existence, but I think it tends to be harder for those of us in the Humanities to envision our lives in this way, because frankly, so much of our self worth ends up being tied to the way in which we are received by institutions. In short, unless a university tells us we are good, we don’t think we are, and there is still suspicion and derision directed toward academics who are not on the tenure track. The “prestige trap” of academia has been well addressed elsewhere, but I really think the problem of self esteem, and the relationship to institutional acceptance is something that hurts many scholars deeply, and it makes me sad.  I know people who are literally crippled by this problem, and who simply cannot find another way to envision their lives.  I know so many people who are angry with academia, and even those who have chosen to step out of it entirely often bitterly regard it as a romance that went horribly wrong, and they see themselves as failures.

I have had to go through a process of ungluing my brain and continually being aware of that sort of negative conditioning to get to where I am now, and the large scale interaction with so many traditional colleagues at this recent event brought that process to the surface.  But this life suits me!  It certainly suits the fact that I have a number of unusual research interests in far off lands that require financing and flexibility.  It also means that I can take more chances with my research topics, and pursue interesting hypotheses. The fact that I work from home supports my introvert nature, and I really do, genuinely, feel good about the teaching I do and the populations I serve.  I would just love to see more academics living without fear and embracing new models for their own lives and becoming empowered in the process.  Sure, I teach, and I write, but I also sing, exercise, try to learn new skills, and have a wonderful family life and rich friendships.  These are all part of my portfolio, and I can find satisfaction and accomplishment in so many different ways as well as staying employed.  As we find traditional employment patterns changing, shifting the attention back to the entirety of our lives and giving ourselves the freedom and permission to focus on what we value and enjoy may help us to find a deeper satisfaction.

One of my schools has just adopted Blackboard 9 this term, and I am loving it. I’ve been using another version of Bb9 prior to this term, but for some reason it seems as though it is a reduced version without all the nifty features, which I’m only getting to play with for the first time this term.  Right now I am loving the grading feature in the gradebook that allows me to view assignments, grade and then move onto the next one without having to return to the gradebook. This really makes a huge difference, and is great design.  It makes grading streamlined and efficient.  I use the voice recognition software on my computer to give feedback, and away I go!

After two research trips, a house move and a heavy Spring term, I was really looking forward to my Summer term this year.   Normally, this is the time when I have a reduced course load and then I get a short break before the madness of Fall term begins again in late August.  I was thinking I might have time to settle into my new home, do some writing, maybe relax a bit.  This has not been the case, and as my Summer terms are now really winding down, I have found myself much more tense and frustrated than I might have expected to be.  Upon reflection, I have found that much of my frustration has been caused by a rather high proportion of student excuses and last minute begging for grades in my Summer terms this year.  I have had a number of students who were far more invested in begging me to raise their grades than they were in simply doing the work assigned to them in the first place or in following the improvement plans that I had created for them.   I care about my students and want them to succeed.  When they behave this way it makes me both sad and angry, and I find dealing with them draining.  Sometimes I know I just need to step away from the keyboard…

I have a couple of observations I wanted to make on these patterns of excuses, though.  First, for many students, Summer terms are a necessity, not their first choice, and students take Summer courses to meet their goals faster or out of some form of desperation. These are not good conditions for student success. Additionally, many Summer courses are accelerated, and students pile them on thinking that they will have no problems completing all the work.  But they often do, and then they try to impress upon me  that they couldn’t keep up in my course because they are so awesome that they took 6 courses!  Really this translates to “I don’t manage my time well and didn’t make your course a priority”.  I’m not sure why I should accommodate this particular problem.

And at the end of every term I get the sob stories, and some of them are quite amazing.  I’ve encountered all manner of student illness, child illness, parental illness, death, stalkers, eviction, job loss,  incarceration, housefires, and any form of deployment and military training you can imagine.  Most of my students are adults leading adult lives.  We all know what it is like to have life get a bit hard, or very very hard, and just put our heads in the sand wishing it would all go away.   But when my students take this approach it leaves me in a horrible position. I hate having to fail students. I want them to do well, and the fact of the matter is that many of my students are taking my courses to get out of a tough spot in life. This means they will have extra challenges.  While I want to show them compassion, giving them higher grades just because they ask me to or grading work submitted well beyond the due date,  is not, in my view, genuine compassion.

Sometimes I have to teach horrible lessons about consequences. If your grant aid is important to you, you will do what it takes to stay in school. If you want to qualify for a specialized academic program, you will make passing my class a priority. You will have to learn your own limits and know whether or not you can really adequately balance family life, work and school.  I give you all the tools to help you succeed in my course plus I give you myself!  I am here to be used as a resource and I will help you!  It really takes so little to get me on your side, but I have to stick to my guns and I have to be fair and consistent.  But sliding on my standards is not really helping students out.  It also suggests that I don’t respect my subject matter or my role as a teacher, and I do.  I have so many triumphs to celebrate this Summer term.  There were a lot of great papers, there was super discussion and a lot of my students did very well.  Many A’s were earned.   I hope to turn my focus to those and hope that next term I won’t have to have so many painful conversations.

I’m having a lovely, slow paced morning here in sunny yet brisk Oakland, drinking coffee, puttering around on my course discussion boards, and listening to sessions from the International Online Conference 2011.  This is the first time I have had the opportunity to participate, and it’s nice seeing a member of my colleagues from my various institutions participating in chat and discussion.

The theme for this year’s conference is mobile learning, or m- learning.  As far as I’m concerned this event cannot be more timely.  This has been the hot topic of conversation in the online and distance learning world for quite some time, and I think it’s pretty clear from what I’m hearing at this conference already that there are myriad ways to approach this topic.  One of the thoughts I’ve had so far, is that as online and distance learning specialists, we’re already becoming more aware of the fact that online professors need to come to terms with the communication and learning styles of digital natives.  In some cases, we, too, fit that definition, but for many professors making the transition to online learning, new learning styles challenge their notions of education and classroom authority.  Therefore, what we need to do is understand how technology is changing the way in which people process information, and simply adapt.  While formerly, in a face to face classroom environment I might have delivered a 20 to 40 minute lecture, online students really only want to see about 3 to 5 minutes.  It doesn’t matter what we think about that, that’s really what the format requires, so we need to understand how people learn, and tailor effective strategies to new learning realities.

So how far ahead of the curve do we end up being as educators?  I hear a number of discussants today talking about trying to anticipate how people will use technology so that we can deliver educational content more creatively.  I see two problems with that :  first we don’t really know how people will use devices, and so if we put a lot of money into developing educational content that doesn’t match the user experience, we’ve wasted a lot of time and money.  I think dedicating resources to help us learn what people want and what they will enjoy will serve us much better in the long run.  I mean, do we even know how young people will learn best five years from now?

Also, in online and mobile learning, I always see people getting really excited about using technology in novel ways to create learning communities and to develop and deliver content.  Now, I’m not exactly a stick in the mud about these sorts of things, but we really need to consider the relationship between innovation and accessibility in our course design. I keep hammering on about this, but I just don’t see it addressed as much as it needs to be.  While online learning it may be the growing trend for younger students, we don’t want to assume that everyone interested in distance learning is a 20 year old with a smart phone.  Right now the majority of my students are actually much older.  A number of my students don’t even know how to initiate an e-mail to me.  Also, I have a lot of students who are quite low income, and possibly well behind on the technology curve.  I think we need to use technology to develop a number of different types of learning modalities, but we need to make sure that we are not leaving students behind with our creativity and innovation.  Also, we need to think internationally about educational needs for developing markets.  I know there are people on that, and I’d like to hear more from them.

Having said all that, I’m really excited about a number of possibilities for mobile education. Honestly, I see a lot of potential in apps for phones that use game strategy. Students do love playing games on their phones, and if we have low risk games and quizzes that support our curricula, students will play them and will learn.  I am also very excited about content that can be used with Kindle and e-book programs.  I would be thrilled to see our academic libraries and publications much more integrated with mobile devices.  I know my students are highly interactive and if they can scribble on texts, cut and paste and bookmark content that is meaningful to them, it will help shape their individual learning journeys.

And I think we also need to start asking questions about the role of learning communities and mobility as well. For as much as I like the idea of using mobile devices to encourage collaboration, I plan to approach this cautiously. Many of my students really still like the solo and asynchronous nature of online courses. I love the idea that perhaps they can use their phones to, say, upload recorded commentary onto the discussion board, but I still fear that at this stage forcing people into real time collaboration for assessments may leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths, and for some (like many of my military students), it’s simply impossible.

What I don’t see enough in discussions about mobile learning, though, is how this stuff really integrates with the pedagogy of online learning. Do mobile learning strategies work best primarily for educational support, or can we build assessments around them that students will really enjoy and that they can all access and participate in? As always, I think we need to balance novelty with understanding the needs and realities of our students.  It may be that we online learning specialists will have to accommodate a range of students in one space with different types of assessments based on what gadgets our students have and enjoy.

I just got back from another fantastic research trip in the UK.  I spend quite a bit of time there, probably anywhere between 6 to 8 weeks during any given year, mostly in Cornwall and London.  Of course for my teaching needs, I always make sure that I have access to an Internet connection.  This time, I learned quite a bit about online teaching capacities in countries that aren’t quite as well served by fast internet service.  In both Cornwall and inland and I had many internet related problems.  Sometimes it was slow, sometimes the wireless connection the house where I was staying could not handle three computers at the same time, and of course, this affected the way in which I teach and work.  I found it was very difficult for me to access my learning platforms, and it was extremely difficult for me to download papers to read and grade.  I felt quite frustrated. If this is my experience in Britain, I can only imagine what things must be like for my students, many of whom are in the military, or maybe doing their own travel somewhere for work or play.  You know what always loaded, though, was Facebook!  When I couldn’t get into Blackboard or ANGEL, Facebook always loaded quickly and easily, and allowed me to use the very basic interactive features that I needed.  Hmmm. This might make us want to think about the kinds of platforms that we use, the kind of features we add to our courses. We need to push for versions of them that are mobility friendly, and easier to use on less robust systems.  This way, we can keep online learning as accessible as possible.

Although I have written before about the ability of online courses to reach underserved populations, I wanted to take a moment here to stress the potential of online learning to educate women. We know that the key to enriching communities and increasing economic development is educating women worldwide. I know in my own courses that I teach a lot of women.  Some are older and making life transitions, some are young mothers or mothers with several children who can’t afford childcare. Some are grandparents entering the world of higher education for the first time. I have amazing women in my courses who, because of the nature of the online classroom, may be encouraged to find and use their voices, instead of feeling intimidated by the classroom experience, as many are.  Think of the potential impact for educating women on a global scale in hard to reach areas with online or particularly mobile technology. I certainly like knowing that I might be making a difference close to home.

A while ago somebody pointed me to this article at the Chronicle of Higher Education purportedly written by somebody who makes money writing term papers and theses for students.  About the only thing that I found surprising in this whole article was that this person used the title of my blog, and referred to himself as an “academic mercenary”.  I really didn’t want my reputation and good name sullied in that manner, so  I sifted through the reader comments with the intent of leaving a clarification, and there was the usual lot of condemnation, shock, horror and awe.  Several commenters pointed out the terrible state of the academic industry, arguing that if professors were only better, more diligent, and worked harder to establish personal relationships with their students more of these rogues would be caught.  To those writers, I give a hearty two fingered salute and a round of “bite me.”   Naturally others were laying the blame on the economics of academia in general, poor standards, commercialism, the market economy in education etc. etc.

So here’s the thing: we can dig for the answers all we want, and go around assigning blame, but the fact of the matter is that cheaters are going to cheat.  I like to say that detecting plagiarism is one of my superpowers, and it is.  I’m very good at spotting it.  I also work hard to try to design assignments that will be less easy for students to plagiarize.  I make them complicated, I like including creative elements, and opinion sections.  But if a student is going to pay somebody to actually log in and take my class, yes, that is going to go entirely unnoticed.  Frankly, under those circumstances, the student wins.  Or loses.  Of course I think they lose, because I like to think that one gains something through the educational enterprise, but not everybody is as idealistic as I am.  Frankly, I accept that, and I realize that my students are there to get a qualification not because they are deeply in love with the Humanities.  If I can make them love the Humanities or Anthropology by the end of the term, fantastic!

You will always have students who will pay to get out of work, who will go the extra mile to plagiarize and cover their tracks, to have somebody else log in and take a test for them.  When I suspect something is fishy, if I can catch them, then great, justice has been done and I go after them with no quarter.  But at this stage in life, I have come to accept that are unscrupulous people out there who do not share my values, and there’s only so much that I personally can do about it.  If somebody chooses to cheat, I’m not going to take that on board as a personal failure as a professor, and shame on anybody who tries to leverage that sort of accusation on the hardworking academics out there today.  I suppose if it’s every other student all the time, you might wish to consider your teaching strategies and engagement, but in general, people cheat because they are dishonest and taking the easy way out.  It’s always been like that, and it always will be. If, through my teaching, I can get my students to feel confident about their abilities and responsible to me and their classmates, then they might see my class as less of a hoop to jump through and more of something they feel personally invested in, and that just might make a difference.

Hello again!  Here we are at the start of another term, and it’s time for me to make yet another of my all too infrequent blog posts.  Last term was unbelievably busy, and I feel as though I have barely had time to catch my breath between the end of Fall term and the start of Spring term.  Over the past two weeks I’ve been working hard at putting together my courses for the term, and doing my usual round of reconsidering and redesigning where necessary.  In a previous post I mentioned an experiment I was running in all of my courses for Fall term where I increased the amount of discussion, and cut down on the extra writing assignments per term, with a greater emphasis on only two significant assignments, a midterm and a final.  I have to admit, that I am, for the most part, extremely pleased with the results of last term.  My students enjoyed the extra weekly engagement, and for the most part put a lot more effort into their final projects.   One of the extra discussion requirements was a personal response post that each student made to the classroom expressing their personal reactions to the material each week.  This had a very nice effect of producing more intimacy in the class, and a greater sense of community.  It also seems as though the students took more time with their final projects, and several of them came up with very engaged and creative assignments.  A winner all the way around, right?

Not entirely.  There were two classes where I found that this approach did not at all lead to greater student engagement.  In fact, I was very disappointed with these courses in general, and they were for the same school.  I needed to pinpoint what was going on there.  Why did the students not do as well?  Why were they not as engaged?  In one instance, there were some administrative problems that caused frustration for both the students and myself right off the bat.  This is never a good way to start.  However, the platform that these students are using is much more limited in range than the other ones I use.  The students don’t have any online tests to take in addition to their written projects, which is a feature all of my other courses have.  This is the only significant difference between them.  I’ve concluded then, that these courses simply did not use enough teaching modalities.  I think we really need to make sure that we’re mixing it up in our online classrooms.  So this term, I’ve added a whole new section of media and lectures to supplement their reading, in addition to the content links I have already put into the course.  Some of these will now be required, some will be just suggested.  What I’m wondering is whether not the addition of the media will stimulate them sufficiently into a richer learning experience. I’m betting it will.

Of course we need to consider course design when considering what we do with extra content.  Putting extra content into a course won’t really do much good if the students are not directed or inspired to engage with it, or if it visually appears incidental to the actual course content.  It will just look like a bunch of links to students, and there’s every chance they will ignore them if they think they can do so and still get through the course requirements.   Put your optional material in a place that will look appealing to students, and where it will be more integrated into the required reading.  I realized that in one of my schools, the extra content was in a place that was easily overlooked, and I have changed that for this term.  In the courses where additional content was more central to the course design, students are much more interested and willing to look at it.  Naturally, I always love to hear your thoughts on these matters.

I started this blog because I am frequently asked how to get into the online teaching game, and I really do want to help people. Problem is, it isn’t as easy as it was and it takes a lot of time to develop a portfolio. I went into this pretty early with a bit of course design and teaching under my belt, so I was able to build a career based on that. Recently I have been asked by quite a few suffering colleagues for advice and to throw them a bone if I have extra courses, and I can do this if they are available, but times are tough.  While I can talk someone through what I did and how I developed my career over the course of a few years, I can’t replicate that for them. But I can share some tips about how I have maintained employment as an academic…

Any rudimentary study of economies will show you that those that are highly specialized in only one industry are doomed, and that works on the individual level as well. Going into grad school to get a silly degree I decided immediately that I wanted to be employable so I took every opportunity I got to develop marketable skills. Mostly, I organized conferences from day one. I did several of them ranging from standard academic conferences to film festivals and have done many of these through the course of my career. I also took courses in and developed specializations in areas like festival and food on both a theoretical and organizational level and I read up on issues like display and representation, also cultural policy. So, when I was hired at a University, I was hired to develop programs that would help bridge academia with policy makers and those driving development because I had already developed a CV with those skills in them in addition to my research interests. While I was there, I took many other opportunities to develop skills: I provided content for cultural festivals, curated exhibitions, sat on race relations committees, organized more conferences, used my position to do consulting for tourism and heritage agencies and, when the opportunity arose, I helped to develop an online MA. Not only did I get useful pedagogical training, I learned how to teach specifically online and how to navigate all sorts of Learning Management Systems which I can now do like a ninja. Turns out I’m also good at it, so when I saw the opportunity to create a life for myself that fit all the other things I wanted from life, I worked it. I set goals and targets and met them. *But* I spent my 20s and early 30s working my ass off developing an extremely varied CV in addition to maintaining an active publishing profile.

I’m not lucky to be employed, I really wanted to be. If I weren’t doing this, I might try to reengineer myself along the lines much more strictly in policy or economic development. I might need to retrain or add a policy degree to my belt if I wanted to go that route more seriously, but I’d do it. Honestly, though, if all 4 of my schools fired me at once, I would still have a job because I also have a background in market research and ethnographic methodology AND I can clean houses. I would not hesitate to go back to that in a heartbeat if I had to. Besides, it’s kinda fun.

So here’s my real advice on making it in academia: don’t even try. Sure, apply for “real” jobs and go for them with gusto, but know that they are like unicorns. Seriously! If you feel that your ego is suffering because you don’t have a “real” academic job, I suggest that you do some serious work to look at your attachment to what that means to you and how you might be holding yourself back. If you do want a “real” job, understand that the world is now full of completely awesome, hard working, neurotic PhDs. Your brilliance and publications are really not worth what you think they are. Your ability to pull in grants, develop service learning projects, network with community organizations and businesses however, much more important, even in the Humanities. You need to show that you have other skills to stand out in *any* job these days.

I would suggest two other things: One, do a serious study of your life. What do you want it to look like down to the last detail. Where do you want to live? HOW do you want to live? How much money do you want and how do you want to spend it? How do you enjoy spending your time? What are your values? What are your hang ups? Second, I’d suggest that you make a list of ALL the transferable skills you have. If you want a job of any sort, you need to sell yourself. Why should anyone hire you at all? Also, the more skills you have, the more you can chase jobs that can help you earn a buck or two. Can you edit? Can you write copy? What software packages do you know? Do you maybe need a bit of extra training somewhere to round out a skill set? I do lots of extra training on educational software and pedagogy to keep up to date, and doing this sort of thing will really serve you well. Sometimes volunteering on things to pump up the CV is really useful. I have volunteered a lot on projects in my career, and so I can now be paid for that sort of work or pass it on if I wish, but seriously consider getting involved with projects that can get you skills and get you noticed. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, ever, especially when the basket is shoddy construction to begin with.

Folks, we as academics are not special little snowflakes with fabulous gifts of intellect and insight to bestow upon the world. We are cogs in a machine, workers who are part of a big, nasty labor market just like everyone else. We just get treated worse because…we think we are special little snowflakes and so don’t behave like labor as we should be doing to secure better treatment as workers. Once you get a handle on this and realize that it has nothing to do with you or your abilities, it is pretty damned liberating. As much as I would love to do nothing more than spend my days in an archive or be writing about esoteric matters and Cornish economics, the fact is, I ALSO love to be able to travel to those archives, pay my bills and eat well, so I just don’t get to do these things as much as I would like, but I get to write enough to make me happy. I made employability a priority and it has served me well.