Klastrup's Cataclysms

- Managing and co-teaching (50%) a 12-week course with 82 students, 1 co-teacher and 4 instructors
- Managing and supervising approx 11 students involved in an external co-operation project (MIL)
- Supervising (main supervisor and support-supervisor) 11 MA-theses (encompassing 17 students) and 1 16-week project - 3 will be handed in March 1st, though.

And if you wonder if I cant say no - I have already turned down about 4 MA projects and several smaller projects. When I signed up for the course and when I started saying yes to more MA students, I thought the course would have around 50-60 students max. - however the study administration continues to let students into the course until monday. Last term only 2 students engaged in the MIL project etc - so it is just bloody difficult to plan your exact workload in advance.

Nevertheless I have insisted on setting 2 days apart for research when I work at home. This means that most days at ITU, I will either have wall-to-wall supervision or be busy preparing classes - not much time for enlightning academic talks with colleagues in the corridor. That's the life of a 2006 university teacher for you.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:21

Comments:

Ah, you have one of those mega-courses too - our "Web Design and Web Aesthetics" course has about 70 students, which is shall we say challenging. We're forced to spread out our semester into 19 weeks (yikes) but only have to TEACH for 12, so there are several weeks in there for project work. I've got co-teachers and all, but it's always a lot of work just keeping it all organised...

Did you look at Anders Fagerjord's highly efficient version of such a course?
http://jilltxt.net/?p=1611
I'm eager to know how that works out - perhaps students will get the same from that as from our more work-intensive (on the part of the teachers) courses?

And GO YOU for insisting on two research days a week. I've found that that really does help - and if it's just ALWAYS that way, it sort of works. You have to be very strict with yourself NOT to prepare classes or do meetings those days, though. And sometimes the meetings are hard to avoid...

# posted by Jill : 3:07 PM

OMG. 11 MA theses? I only just realised. That's outrageous. I'm supervising about 4-5 (depending on how you define an "active" MA student) and find that that takes a lot more time than I'd imagined. 11 is almost a full time job in itself.

# posted by Jill : 3:09 PM

..and the now 11 MIL project students that Im coordinating and will heavily supervising in April and May...And dont think that my situation is that extreme in a Danish context, it sadly reflects that crazy student/teacher ration that the government are currently enforcing with their in reality decreasing funding of the Danish Universities (much money have been allocated for centralised, "hot topic" research funding boards, but the amount of money given to the university each time a student passes a year worth of exams (the socalled STÅ) have been cut down on regularly, this year with around 3% pr STÅ as far as I remember).

# posted by Lisbeth : 3:58 PM