Outages at peak usage times suggest deep-seeded technical problems. Although I don’t have any information on the specific causes of last fall’s outage, I suspect that the hardware powering CUNYFirst, either the database, the web server, or both, were simply overwhelmed by the activity from students, faculty, and administrative staff.
Today, I learned of two alternative access points to CUNYFirst data.
CUNYFirst MyInfo. This access point, requiring CUNY Portal login, allows faculty to view our teaching schedules and student rosters. Instead of requiring a live connection to the CUNYFirst database, which could potentially crash the system, this appears to use a cached data: MyInfo pulls data from CUNYFirst once a day, presumably in the middle of the night. While it might not be live enrollment data, once a day is “good enough.”
QC Courses. This is specific to Queens College and allows anyone to quickly access basic course information without having to login.1 Since the system is essentially public, it does not contain student rosters, but it does list the enrollment count, the catalog and section numbers, and the time and location for each course.
I welcome these solutions because it spares CUNY from having to “glue jets on a bus“, and it spares me from having to use CUNYFirst for looking up course information. With these alternative access points in place, most of us won’t have to bother with CUNYFirst during peak usage time at the beginning of the semester. And I personally won’t have to use CUNYFirst until I need to report attendance in the second or third week of the semester and until I need to report grades in late May. These alternative access points will make the launching this semester significantly less painful than the previous one.
I should note that, after talking to a few colleagues at other CUNY sites, the information management and registration functions at Queens College appear to run smoother than at some other colleges in the system. ↩
The beginning of the fall semester at CUNY is in three days, and the website that controls everything at CUNY is wreaking havoc yet again.
I tried to get my class roster for the one class I am teaching this semester at Queens College, but CUNYFirst has stymied me twice.
First, I had to change my password because it expires every few months. Since I use 1Password, that’s not that difficult. What takes a long time are two things:
remembering the password policy (it’s apparently limited to passwords shorter than 13 characters),
waiting over two minutes for the database to update and allow you to log in with your new credentials
I can’t tell if the people in the above image are trying to fix the problem or whether they represent the CUNY population who cannot access this all-in-one piece of crapware that handles every single function we do at CUNY. Either way, the image is as uninspired as the software that controls one of the biggest public universities in the country.
In college, if you have an unpaid balance on your account, the bursar and registrar offices collaborate to block from you from registering for the next semester, you get dropped from your classes, or you won’t be awarded your degree.
This past year has been very difficult for a lot of people because of the pandemic, including some of my students. Some have been infected with COVID-19, some have lost family members, some have lost a job or two (as I did), and others have suffered in other ways that I can’t even imagine. It stands to reason that some students would have fallen behind in paying their college bills.
As part of the last spring’s CARES relief packages, the federal government dispersed funds for colleges and universities, including providing aid for students who might need support.
While CUNY did offer students some support, including providing them with iPads so they could do remote learning, the university has implemented two austerity measures that hurt students:
Students with balances due were purged from their Spring 2021 classes.
CUNY has raised the minimum number of students needed for a class to run, meaning it has reduced the number of classes available for students to take.
The first action causes all kinds of troubles. One Media Studies professor in shared the story of a student who was dropped from their classes and might have their student visa cancelled, which would put the student at risk for deportation. CUNY is cheap so it’s unlikely that the student owes tens of thousands of dollars.
The second action makes it harder for students to graduate in four years. The university has touted its Finish in Four program that largely depends on students taking classes during winter and spring semesters. At Queens College, the college cancelled all of the Media Studies classes this winter semester classes, setting back many students’ progress for finishing their degrees.
The administration just sent around an email proclaiming that CUNY fights for its students. Given how it has shut out students from registering for classes and cutting the number of classes available for them to take, the words ring hollow.
Earlier this week, I submitted the grades for my first online, winter-session class. As I wrote earlier on this site, this was my first experience with a fully online course, either as a student or as a teacher. Aside from speaking with a couple of students who have taken online classes and colleague who has taught a language class over the Internet, I developed this course in a vacuum. This was both liberating and challenging. I felt free to use whatever tools I wanted, but I was also plagued with the uncertainty of whether I was doing things The Right Way, or what technologists refer to as “best practices.”
Since I have taught this class face-to-face for several semesters, I adopted the course into twelve media technologies. Each media technology constitutes a learning unit. The structure is basically as follows:
Manual to Mechanical Media
Writing
Early Print
Mass Print
Photography
Electromechanical Media
Telegraph
Telephone
Motion Pictures
Sound Recording
Electromagnetic and Digital Media
Radio
Television
Computers
Internet
My colleague, who I’ll refer to as Claudine, suggested that I divide the class into a series learning units, each consisting of objectives, assignments, and assessments. I took her advice and, for each media technology, I assigned students to…
read a chapter from Irving Fang’s textbook Alphabet to Internet and a condensed version of an article from the fifth edition of the anthology Communication in History,
After studying four media technologies, I assigned students a midterm exam consisting of essays.
The course was mostly asynchronous. Because the course was online, I wanted to provide students with some flexibility. Nothing about the course was live. They did not have to “tune in” to a lecture. Everything was designed to be completed at his or her own pace. However, because the winter session schedule was so compressed and had to “squeeze in” an entire semester’s work in three weeks, I did require students to complete four learning units per week to keep apace.
Here’s how I set up each learning unit of the course:
Google Classroom labels this teacher a “hero,” presumably because it will take a superuser to restore students’ deleted work.
Starting a year ago this month, Google offered its Apps for Education clients Google Classroom, a free-to-use, stripped-down learning management system. I became intrigued with the offering, especially after both Queens College and Fordham adopted it and began offering workshops to train faculty on how to use it. I adopted it in the middle of this current spring semester, and it did what I wanted…except when it deleted all of my Fordham students’ work.
LMS No More
After teaching university-level classes for more than a decade, I’ve had it with bloated Learning Management Systems. A couple of years ago, I swore off Blackboard and Moodle because, as an adjunct professor, it was too much work to manage three or four courses on multiple learning management platforms. It was much easier to launch a static, public-facing website that all my students could find with an easy-to-remember URL or a web search. They could get a particular week’s readings, for example, in as little as two clicks and usually without ever entering a password.
However, going with a static web site instead of an LMS meant I would lose two key features: a gradebook and a platform to collect assignments electronically.
Rolling-Your-Own Gradebook
The gradebooks on Moodle and Blackboard both suck. Even when I used an LMS, I resorted to recording and calculating my grades on a spreadsheet: first Excel, then Numbers, and now Google Sheets. The added benefit of using a spreadsheet program is that I can upload grades with a tab-delimited or comma-separated values (CSV) file. It not only cuts down on the tedium of inputting grades using slow-responding pull-down menus, it also cuts down on errors.1
Collecting Assignments
Collecting assignments, on the other hand, remained tricky and offered no perfect solution. Having students email me resulted in an alphabet soup of attachments—PDF, RTF, DOCX, ODT, you name it—that I would have to convert, organize, and maybe even print to grade. Google Drive seemed to offer a better solution: students could compose or upload their assignment and then share the document with me. But then I would end up with a ton of files in my own Drive that I would have to organize, too. I also would get annoying email notifications for each student alerting me that I have been invited to view, comment, or edit someone’s document. And, at Queens College, students would have to share their document with jmonroy@qc.cuny.edu but not my more official email address of juan.monroy@qc.cuny.edu. That’s because QC doesn’t use Google Mail, and Google Apps doesn’t know that jmonroy@qc.cuny.edu is the same user as juan.monroy@qc.cuny.edu.
The most basic solution appeared to be having students bring paper copies to class. But as Steve Jobs said about using a stylus for smartphones, nobody wants that: “You have to get them and put them away, and then you lose them.”
Yuck, indeed!
The same goes for hard copies. Students inevitably have printer issues, forget or neglect to staple their pages, or simply don’t bring their assignment to class and then ask, “can I bring it to your mailbox?” For an adjunct who comes to campus only once a week, that’s not practical. I’ve also had it with shuttling student papers from one place to another and organizing them into piles across the floor of my home office. There has to be a better way!
Google Does Homework
Because they each use Google Apps for Education, Google Classroom is available at Queens College and at Fordham University. The platform offers two compelling features. First, it allows you to post announcements to your students, and second, it allows you collect assignments—nicely organized into a Classroom folder in my Google Drive—and respond to each student’s work. I could care less for the announcements feature, but the assignments function seemed to address my quibbles over using Google Drive. Students submit their assignments and they go to a folder in my Google Drive. I can grade an assignment for each student, comment on their document, and “return” it with feedback.
When I went to grade an assignment, I noticed that a particular student, let’s call her Allison, had attached a file from her Drive. When I followed the link, labelled “Drive File,” I got a Not Found: 404 Error message.
I see that Allison attached a “Drive File.”
But following the “Drive File” link yields this 404-error page.
That was odd. I wrote Allison and explained that she must have done something wrong to improperly submit her assignment. I proceeded to grade the next student’s assignment. Brandon also had a “Drive File” link and following it took me to the same 404-error page. The same thing happened for Charlene, for Dmitri, for Evelyn, and for Federico.
Dammit! All the work was gone.
A few panicked web searches led me to a Google Classroom support forum. Having not found a topic relevant to my problem, I started a new one. A tech support forum moderator promptly responded and suggested a puzzling course of action: that we check our Trash. It was basically a case of Classroom moving our files to my Trash, and I should expect to find them there.
I reflexively like to keep my Trash empty because I’m old and remember when hard drive storage was a scarce resource. Keeping the trash empty ensured you had liberated some drive sectors for more important files.
Apparently, because the student’s work ended up mysteriously in my Trash, all the student files were now gone because I emptied the Trash on my Google Drive. Moreover, when I asked a few students to resubmit their assignments, they told me that they couldn’t find their documents. Not only did Classroom delete the files from my Drive, it also deleted it from their Drives too.
I reported that this “new information had come to light,” and the same support forum moderator suggested that we do some workaround to recover our work. Despite suspecting that this workaround didn’t apply to our situation, I had the students try it anyway: unsubmitting and resubmitting their assignments didn’t work. The files were still gone!
And That’s Why We Back Up Our Work
After realizing that the Google support staff could not help us, I called the support staff at Fordham. The Google Apps administrators there were able to restore the Classroom files from a backup and bring back my students’ work.
Compared to other learning management systems, Google Classroom is really limited, but it touts one worthwhile feature that I liked: collecting and grading student work. But after deleting my students’ assignments, it looks like I will have to revert to collecting papers in class. I simply can’t trust Google Classroom to do the one thing it was supposed to do.
It was also a wake up to my students: the cloud is not a backup.
My colleagues at CUNY have warned me to submit my grades on time, otherwise I would have to fill out grade changes for each student on multiple slips of paper. I joked that I would rather do that, using a mail merge or something similar, than deal with those slow-responding pull-down menus on CUNY First. ↩
New Technologies examines the social impact of emerging technologies such as the Internet and new telephonic and audiovisual media. In it, students survey the origins of digital communication and the Internet and engage closely with contemporary scholarship on digital technologies and institutions. We will also consider the impact of the digital revolution on our culture.
I made a makeshift recording studio in my bedroom, including a cylinder box of rolled oats as a microphone stand.
Pardon the dust around here… it’s been a very busy time for me as the COVID-19 pandemic put a whole lot of extra work on me in terms of class preparation. It robbed me of any desire to sit in front of a computer to post to this site.
I’m sorry. I hope you’ll take me back,
When we went to remote instruction, the administration at Pratt and at CUNY recommended that we turn our courses from live, in-person classes to asynchronous, remote classes—with a short, synchronous weekly session via Zoom or Google Meet.
The spring semester ended about two months ago, but since then I have been teaching two online classes for Queens College in their two summer sessions—Summer 1 in June, and Summer 2 in July.
This is not my first time teaching online, remote classes. Indeed, I have been teaching online sections of Media Technologies and Contemporary Media for a few years now, both in summer and winter sessions. But given what I learned over the last few months, during our emergency switch to remote learning, I thought it best to revise my courses given what I learned in the spring term.
My goals for the summer courses were basically to…
revise the structure of my syllabi to make it easier to find information
break up the recorded video lectures into shorter segments,
in the case of Contemporary Media, assign an open educational resource textbook to save my students—some of whom are food insecure—some money.
For these courses, I have spent an average of six to eight hours working on each module. Since each course has twelve modules, I spent the equivalent of a full-time job working on these courses since early June.
Revising the syllabus was pretty easy. I moved away from the traditional calendar-based schedule to one structured along learning modules. Each module had the same three elements as my previous courses: a textbook reading, a narrated-slideshow lecture recording, and a quiz. But this time I listed each task under each module as “assignments.” You can see an example of this on my Media Technologies syllabus. I hope it was easier for students to figure out their assignments.
There are many celebrants of Open Educational Resources for textbooks, but I am not convinced that this model of textbooks is ready for wide deployment, particularly in the specific courses I teach.
The one textbook that seemed useful for either of this summer’s courses was Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. You can get a copy from the Open Textbook Library. I really liked that it was available in many different formats, including PDF and EPUB, and that you could read it on the web using nothing more than a browser. However, what really made this textbook difficult to use was that it was last updated in 2009.
Since the textbook was woefully out of date, I had to use the lectures to update the outdated information from the book. For example, there are no longer is a Big Four recording music conglomerates nor is there a Big Six movie conglomerates. In the case of music, EMI was absorbed by Universal Music Group and Warner Music with Sony Music as the third conglomerate standing. And in the case of the movie industry, Disney acquired Fox in 2019 for $71 billion, leaving only five major conglomerates.
And then there were five…
Because I was using a textbook I hadn’t used before, I had write new reading quizzes from scratch. This took about an hour per module, but outlining each lecture, preparing each slideshow, and then recording each module’s screencast took an additional six to seven hours a day.
Today, I posted the videos for the last module of the two summer sessions. As a “victory lap” of sorts, I compiled a few numbers from the two classes I taught this summer.
Media Technologies
Contemporary Media
Total
Modules
12
12
24
Slides
608
593
1201
Videos
46
51
97
TRT
6h 31m 46s
6h 35m 15s
13h 7m 1s
Average Slides per Module
50.67
49.42
50.04
Average Slides per Video
13.22
11.63
12.38
Average TRT per Module
32m 39s
32m 56s
32m 48s
Average TRT Per Video
8m 31s
7m 45s
8m 7s
The biggest reason I wanted to break up the lecture into shorter segments was to make the videos about six minutes each. Previously, each module’s lecture was about 20 minutes long. Based on the numbers, it looks like I failed. Each video for Media Technologies averaged about 8 ½ minutes, and each video for Contemporary Media averaged about 7 ¾ minutes.
However, I have to give myself credit for consistency. The total running time of all the recorded videos for each class were surprising close: 6 hours 31 minutes for Media Technologies versus 6 hours 35 minutes and Contemporary Media. And I also used a very similar number of slides: 608 in the case of Media Technologies and 593 in the case of Contemporary Media.
With the spread of COVID-19 into a global pandemic (thanks Trump!), all of my jobs are transitioning to remote instruction. CUNY Queens College remote classes go live on Thursday, March 19, and my classes at Pratt Institute are due to restart online on March 30. At NYU, where I am an hourly, contractor, we’ve been told to work from home until further notice.
As a knowledge worker, I am lucky that I can still work and earn money in this disrupted environment. My 2015 MacBook Pro works as good as it did five years ago, I have fiber-optic Internet at home, and, should I need to travel, my unlimited mobile data plan includes tethering. I also have a good USB mic for recording lectures.
For some techno-utopians, this might seem like the realization of a long-awaited reality: the mass-adoption of telecommuting and of online education. But as I think we’re all learning, transitioning to remote work and to distance learning is incredibly difficult and will certainly be less effective than being at work and at school.
I can’t offer much advice on remote working. I’m literally going through on-the-job training in that department. However, I can offer some advice on online teaching. I’ve taught many iterations of two online courses for years, namely Contemporary Media and Media Technologies during the summer and winter sessions, and here’s what I’m doing for my current classes in the age of the virus.
Just Google It
For years, I’ve been cool to using Google products. But I use Google Classroom and G Suite for assignments for a couple of reasons. First, Google Classroom doesn’t have too many features, and thus it is still pretty easy to use. For example, it’s a lot simpler than the bloatware that is Blackboard. Second, Google’s apps are what my students will encounter in the “real” world. Or, at least, these apps work like the ones other companies uses, such as Office 365. No one is going to use Blackboard or Moodle once they leave school.
Change How You Teach
Was your in-person class a three-hour lecture? Don’t run your online class with you talking to a webcam for three hours! That’s a sure way to have students do something else while you lecture, thus defeating the purpose of having the class in the first place.
You’ll have to deconstruct your class into parts. Some will have to become asynchronous, and some can remain synchronous. Let’s go through the two.
Asynchronous Activities
Asynchronous activities are those that are done on the student’s own timeline, not at a specific date and time. However, in order to keep students on task, you should require students to complete activities by a certain deadline.
Readings
You already assign readings from a textbook, a journal article, or something posted on the Internet. Think of other material that may complement those readings.
For example, as I teach film classes, I will assign one or two more critical essays each week that are available through EBSCO, JSTOR, or whatever databases your university subscribes. There are also some that you can access on a newspaper’s or magazine’s website, and there are other good readings on the open web. It is up to you, of course, to review and validate their value.
Lectures
For years, online teachers have evangelized the idea of the flipped classroom. In this model, you record your lecture ahead of time and have the students watch it on their own. It’s called “flipped” because you do some other activity—group work, discussion sessions, a lab, etc.—during the class time, instead of having the professor lecture at the class. In the age of virus, there won’t be an in-class session for the “other activity.”
The most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is to compress the lecture into something much shorter than you normally do in-person. My two-hour lectures, for example, become twenty-minute presentations. Because you’re not interacting with students and checking if they understand you, you can proceed a lot faster. Students can pause and restart the lecture, as well review and rewind as they see fit.
There’s some art to crafting effective slides for this medium. That only comes with practice.
Film Screenings
Three of my four classes this semester are film classes which have screenings. I still want students to watch the films we had planned for the semester, but having them watch them on their own is tricky.
In the old days, we would have students watch films by requesting the titles from the reserve desk at the library. However, since we’re social distancing as much as possible, it would make sense for students to stream the titles online. And that is where things get tricky because each option comes with its own complications.
Pick a streaming service that students can subscribe to, such as The Criterion Channel, and assign films from their collection. Subscriptions for The Criterion Channel, for example, are available on a monthly basis for $10.99 and yearly basis for $99.99.
Point students to titles available for rent or purchase through Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play.
If your institution or local library has a generous license to Kanopy, you can use that option to assign films from this collection.
Some of these options might be unaffordable for many students. After all, I have about six to seven weeks of the semester remaining. That’s a lot of films for students to rent or buy. And in the case of certain institutions, Kanopy might be too expensive. That’s why the New York Public Library did not renew its Kanopy subscription.
Essays
For essays, I’ve posted a Google Classroom assignment with an attached Google Doc that students must use to write their essays. You can configure it so there’s a copy for each student. I wouldn’t call grading essays “easy,” but you can comment on essays and return the work within the Google Docs—Google Classroom environment.
It works only if you require students to use Google Docs. Sometimes, they don’t observe that rule and upload a Microsoft Word document, a PDF, or even an Open Office document. Unfortunately, none of these work for commenting in Google Classroom, and you have to make students resubmit the assignment correctly.
Quizzes
Google Forms allows you to make quizzes. If you do objective questions and provide an answer key, the “robot” will grade the questions for you. Otherwise, you can grade subjective questions manually.
I prefer not to use Google Quiz for subjective questions. Students cannot save their responses to complete their work later. They have to finish it in one sitting.
As I mentioned earlier, students can’t save their progress in Google Forms. Instead, I prefer to write questions in Google Docs. Students write their responses below the question. I grade the responses by using commenting feature in Google Docs. Then I add up their points, record the score, and return the assignment.
Google Classroom allows you to use rubrics, but I hate rubrics so I don’t use this feature.
Synchronous Activities
Synchronous activities are those that are done at a specific date and time, either with the entire class, with groups of students, or one-on-one sessions with an individual student.
Discussion Sessions
For the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester, I am scheduling an hourlong discussion section for each of my classes. We are hosting these on Google Meet, which normally allows for 100 simultaneous participants. But in the age of the virus, they increased that limit to 250 participants.
Office Hours
Since 2016, I have been using the self-scheduling appointment slots feature in Google Calendar. I use these so students can sign up for in-person office hours, although they can also schedule remote appointments through Google Meet.
In the age of the virus, all meetings will be remote and held through Google Meet. Students who sign up for an appointment will receive a confirmation email of their appointment. The email—and the entry in the student’s Google Calendar—contains a link to the Video Call and a phone number (with a PIN) to join the call by telephone.
Generally, I only use the audio-only feature of Google Meet, but in case you want to present something to a student, it makes sense to use the desktop web browser or the mobile apps to do this.
Need More Help?
If you’re interesting in learning more about transitioning your course to online, remote instruction, get in touch with me on the Contact page. We can discuss a plan that could work for you.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
I’m following a similar structure from the past, which I have described before on this site. Each course includes twelve modules, and for each module students will have to complete the following:
read an assigned chapter from the textbook
watch a video lecture of a narrated slideshow
take an online quiz consisting of objective questions
After four modules, students will take an exam consisting of subjective questions that they will have five days to complete.
In the past, I used to release module consisting of a video lecture and a quiz for a course topic and would have them due the following day. But having read a blog post by Anastasia Salter about “Rethinking the Online Summer Intensive,” I rethought my own online summer intensive courses. I didn’t quite go as far as Salter who released all the modules at the beginning of the course. Instead, I wanted to strike a balance between giving students the flexibility of completing work on their own schedule but also provide some structure where students won’t feel overwhelmed.
I kept the daily release schedule but changed the daily deadlines for quizzes to a weekly one. Everyday between Tuesday and Friday, I will post a recorded lecture and a quiz. But instead of making them due the following day, I’m providing students some flexibility and allowing them to submit the four quizzes by Monday night. That gives students at least three days to complete their quizzes. They can either keep apace completing a quiz per day or they can procrastinate and binge the weeks’ material.
And I’m also setting up twice-weekly office hours via Google Meet, which I’ve only used once, but I think is a tremendous improvement over Google Hangouts.
I didn’t implement her other changes, such as the 100-point grading scale for the whole semester. I understand the appeal of a “progress bar,” but how would I account for getting ten quizzes and three exams to add up to 100 points? That would require granting students four points for a quiz of at least ten questions.
A few moments ago at a Starbucks in Sylmar, California, after grading a set of take-home exams and posting grades to CUNYFirst, I finished another teaching semester at Queens College. I now get about a week off before starting anew with an online, winter session course that I will be conducting from my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house. This shortens my winter break a bit, but the online course allows me to extend my stay here in California until mid-January. New York is always so cold, sad, and boring in early January, and I am not the least bit bereft about missing out on whatever winter dreariness there is back east.
While I should be excited about finishing another semester and again submitting grades on time, allowing me a peaceful Christmas break, that enthusiasm is tempered because just over 20% of students in my Media Criticism course didn’t receive a passing grade. Nine out of forty-five students outright failed, and one student just stopped attending but still submitted a take-home final exam. In all but two cases, the students just stopped attending class.
Sadly, this is a common occurence at Queens College. I was shocked to see that, in the first class I taught there years ago, about a third of the class failed. Up to that point, I had only limited teaching experiences: as a TA at UCSB and NYU, and teaching one introductory film course at Marymount Manhattan College. In those situations, there was always one or two students who didn’t complete the course, usually because of an extraordinary circumstance, but having ten students fail a single course was a terrible surprise. In my second semester at Queens College, I alerted my students to this fact, imploring them to not repeat this same, terrible feat. For whatever reason, in that second semester, the failure rate was much lower, but since then it has crept back up.
I don’t have a single explanation for why so many Queens College students fail these courses compared to similar courses at other colleges. However, a few factors, however, come to mind:
Some students have challenging socioeconomic circumstances.
Some students have demanding family obligations, either raising their own children or tending for other needy relatives.
Some students work full-time and are taking courses in their scant spare time.
Some students’ commutes make it hard to attend class.1
Some students are returning to school after an absence and are having a difficult time readjusting to school and/or learning how to “do” college.
Some students come from NYC or other urban public schools, where they largely excelled because they stayed out of trouble, not necessarily because they were academically proficient.
Some students are stuck in “K-12 mode,” treat the classroom as a battleground between student and teacher, and are consumed by what they “get away with” in class, with assignments, and on exams.
These are some pretty significant obstacles to overcome, and it’s not unreasonable to see how students facing these would have trouble in a college class, especially where I really push the students beyond procedural learning into more conceptual terrain. In other words, my courses are hard because I expect a lot of students, and I haven’t yet come to terms with dumbing down courses for more favorable reviews or a higher passing rate.
For the new year, I am implementing a few new policies at Queens College to help make clear that attending class and participating in the day-to-day assignments, not just the written ones that count towards their final grade, is essential in succeeding in college and beyond.
One step is to implement two new attendance policies:
Negative reinforcement: Students may not miss more than four weeks of class for any reason.
Positive reinforcement: Students attending more than 12 weeks of class will receive a half-grade bonus to their final grade.
These two seem a lot more consequential than factoring their attendance as a percentage of their final grade.
I’m also instituting a second policy in my Media Criticism course: require students to present on assigned readings. This worked really well in the New Technologies class that I taught years ago but never got to do again. The class relied a lot on readings and developing conceptual frameworks for understanding media. It also spared them from having me lecture, pontificate, and yammer for a three-hour (!) class period.
I hope these policies keep students engaged and invested, not just for my Media Criticism courses, but for all their other courses at the college. We owe it to our students to push them into realizing their greatness, especially in the face of the formidable circumstances many of them face. Allowing them to pass, by doing subpar work or missing many class sessions, is a disservice to what they should expect from us and why they enrolled in the first place.
My eight-mile commute from Brooklyn to Queens College is a lethargic agony. I can bike there in less than an hour, but it’s through some pretty bike-unfriendly terrain. Alternatively, I can take public transportation, which will take about an hour-and-forty minutes to travel those eight miles, via a mix of subway lines and busses. ↩
