Academic freedom / pre built course

[hester]

Hi ,

  How do you handle dealing with a college that pre builds the course , assignments, lecture notes,etc and requires you adhere to it?

Thanks

[Hibush]

Not much of a college, but easy money for the instructor. You can spend your intellecual efforts on someting else.

[hester]

This college is public and has mandated assignments. Im surprised this is legal.

[dismalist]

This college is public and has mandated assignments. Im surprised this is legal.

Teaching in public universities can be considered "government speech", like K-12 teachers' speech, and thus subject to government control. Some courts have provided for protecting some speech, but the scope is not uniform, or even clear. [paraphrasing Eugene Volokh]

[ciao_yall]

What is the context of this?

Is it a broadly agreed upon survey course? Required for licensing in a particular field?

[Caracal]

This college is public and has mandated assignments. Im surprised this is legal.

Teaching in public universities can be considered "government speech", like K-12 teachers' speech, and thus subject to government control. Some courts have provided for protecting some speech, but the scope is not uniform, or even clear. [paraphrasing Eugene Volokh]

It could potentially run afoul of accrediting agencies which do have statements about academic freedom. The tricky part is defining what academic freedom means in the context of teaching. It obviously isn't absolute. If I'm teaching a course on European history, I can't just teach American history instead. I also can obviously be told that if I'm teaching the American History survey, I can't just have the whole class be about WW2. Even beyond extreme examples like these, there are all kinds of ways in which class content is regulated. A lot of this depends on discipline. It would be considered very strange and inappropriate to have mandates for history courses outside of basic coverage and broad expectations about appropriate assignments for class level. But, I've taught writing courses which are much more regulated in terms of the assignments and I know that it's not uncommon in some science disciplines to have courses that follow a pretty rigid model and have uniform exams and assignments.

Lecture notes are pretty extreme. It's one thing to say that in week 3, you need to teach x, y and z so that the students can do this particular assignment. It's another to tell the instructor exactly how to teach those assignments and even what to say. Among other things that's going to lead to some deadly lectures...

[RatGuy]

Hi ,

  How do you handle dealing with a college that pre builds the course , assignments, lecture notes,etc and requires you adhere to it?

Thanks

All of our online offerings look like this. The division which oversees the online courses (it's a separate college, rather the home college) hires instructors to design gen-ed courses in their respective disciplines, including reading, assignments, assessments, discussions, videos, etc. These courses adhere to the SLOs and requirements of F2F classes, since they have the same catalogue number. These online courses are staffed by instructors from the online division (instructors from home colleges can be assigned to these courses, but must first complete online training). I don't see the problem.

[AmLitHist]

Most of my CC's online versions of gen ed classes have gone this way:  college-mandated Courses of Record that adhere to the CLOs and use pre-established course shells. A couple of years ago there was a lot of anger from faculty along the lines of academic freedom. Personally, as I'm approaching retirement, I'm OK with my $80K/year job as a grader (using the provided rubrics, of course) and attendance-taker. Lots of my colleagues have come to agree, and if they don't, they simply make sure to avoid teaching the course online (and can thus build and use their own courses).

The mandated courses in question in my discipline, at least, are fine--not anything earth-shaking in terms of content or pedagogy, but competent and reasonable. And with the declining readiness of the students coming to us from our feeder high schools, sticking to the basics is fine; the other bells and whistles such as creative projects, in-depth research, and such that I used to include in my Comp I and II classes were, honestly, lost on most of those students.

As such, I guess I'm adding to the problem of ebbing academic freedom, but in my particular situation, it seems warranted.

[lightning]

I'm with hibush on this. Think of pre-built courses as easy money; spend only as much time on the course as needed to meet the learning outcomes.

Cookie cutter college courses are often the result of some admincritter's notion of effective enterprise-wide assessment practices, and they sometimes link it to accreditation ("The accreditor requires . . . . blah, blah"). Sometimes the cookie cutter courses are installed in order to make it easier for the analytics jocks in the institutional research office to make their spreadsheets, pie graphs, and reports that no one reads. Sometimes they are put in place to give some admincritter a feeling of control and/or relevance. Whatever the reason, your college is not the kind of place that will value your individualized contributions to content, teaching, and discourse.

So, take the easy money and apply your scholarly endeavors elsewhere. You would be surprised at how little work you have to do in a cookie cutter course. (IF it's designed properly).

[Mobius]

This college is public and has mandated assignments. Im surprised this is legal.

What makes it illegal?

[MarathonRunner]

I've applied for several sessional positions recently (as a new PhD starting a postdoc soon) that indicate they are "canned" courses. I have no problems with this for large, lower level, general introductory courses. There are basics that won't vary widely between instructors. What I can bring to the course based on my experiences and research is what I add to the course, but anyone in my field will teach the same fundamentals.

[spork]

This college is public and has mandated assignments. Im surprised this is legal.

You should demand a refund from Harvard Law School.

[kaysixteen]

Doesn't med school sorrta operate like this, with the AMA mandating that med schools must require students to take courses in x.y,z, which must needs cover content the AMA dictates?   And who would argue that such strictures, essentially compelling med schools to ensure that future docs get a uniform baseline of needed medical skills and knowledge, is a bad thing?

[Ruralguy]

Most professional programs of any type, and graduate or undergraduate, have required curricula to be approved by AMA, or ABET or whatever. I don't think they typically dictate *how* to teach these courses, though I imagine there have been many articles regarding best practices in teaching anatomy or whatever, and certainly have been many zillions for teaching physics (not that everyone agrees, or that it matters if they don't).

That being said, I imagine that there are some med schools , business schools, law schools that have fairly packaged versions of their courses.

However, the fact that its a hierarchical requirement is probably what keeps people from screeching more regarding   the teaching of packaged courses. That is, the department or program, in its defense, says that all of these students, taught by a half a dozen different profs must then go on to another few teaching the next course, and so forth. If all just taught however they wanted, there would be too much variety in what people actually learned, and probably also more difficulty in accurately assessing what they learned or what was taught.