Teaching as an online instructor at a variety of colleges has its advantages- one is that I get to see how different deans, department chairs, etc. run their departments, and most importantly, I can see where there might be some overlap in grading requirements among the schools without too much guesswork on my part. Recently,…
During the past few years that I’ve taught online, it’s been a lot of trial and error to figure out what schools and supervisors expect from online adjuncts. Generally, we get tossed into the online classroom without much guidance (and regardless of how long you’ve been doing this, different schools place value on different areas/assignments…
I went back to the classroom yesterday for the first time in a very very long time (for me, that means it’s been almost a year of fully online teaching). Oh, how I had missed every part of it. Printing out my class rosters, putting on actual clothes and makeup to leave the house, the…
During the past few weeks, I’ve been a student in an online faculty development course to prepare myself to teach an upcoming International Business Communication class. The course focuses on global learning, but much of the material discusses the basics that college instructors need to know (and potentially share with their students) about simplifying the…
If you haven’t figured out how to cut down on the time you spend answering student emails, I may have the answer for you! When I tell other teachers that I have a number of stock email responses ready to go in the Notes app of my iPhone, some of them are relieved to have…
Teaching online while I’ve been traveling for the past 3 weeks has been much more manageable than I expected. Yes, there were mornings in Bangkok where I graded papers on the hotel bathroom while my sister slept in, and one morning in particular that I had a Skype interview for a new school at 6…
Working from home seems to be more common these days, and it make sense that those of us doing so would want to make the very most of it. Whether you take the opportunity to stay home with your kids, work odd hours, or travel the world, being ‘location independent’ is a tremendous opportunity that…
As I’ve been working this afternoon, making some big changes to my online courses here at the public library (my new favorite place to ‘work from home’), and also trying to come up with something to write about on the blog today, it occurred to me that maybe I could blend the two (why is…
While brainstorming what I should write about for the blog today, I decided the topic of ‘easy efficiency would be a something valuable to discuss. If you’re an online instructor, there are little inconveniences that creep in throughout the semester that become frustrating (sometimes without it occurring to us that we could actually fix these…
Recently I was asked by a local college to teach a faculty development workshop for part-time instructors. I eagerly agreed, and the entire event was everything I’d hoped it would be. As a group, we all shared our best kept teaching secrets, and many of those ‘secrets’ had to do with time management, so I…