You Want Me to Do What? The Life and Times of an Adjunct

Let me know if these sounds familiar…

Scenario #1:
As an adjunct, you get an email from one of the departments you worked for wondering if you can teach a course. And oh, the class begins in two weeks. Fortunately, the beleaguered office assistant provides you a previously used syllabus… but it’s five years old. Okay… so what do you do!? First, you say yes to the course… because why not. Then you get to the business of creating, from a very loose structure, a course you would want to teach.

Scenario #2:
As an adjunct you are asked by your department if you can come up with a course based on your research (current or past). No one on campus is teaching a similar course so you are left with literally building something from the ground up. And oh, by the way, your degree was not in curriculum development.

Without much guidance, you begin your online search. You find an old syllabus of yours and use it as a basic structure. As is expected, you go overboard on the content and pile on the assignments. In the end, you have a good class that you now need to prep for so that you can guide the student through the curriculum. You get bogged down in your own course prep, get behind on grade, and everyone has less than a good time.

Both scenarios are very real and happen nearly every day to both adjuncts and tenure-track faculty alike. Where you do you begin when you are asked to construct a course that students will take? What do you do when the academic session begins, and things don’t seem to be coming together as planned? How are you going to determine what you want the students to learn, how are you going to check if they are learning it, have you built in opportunities where you can improvise and pivot? What happened and how can you make sure something different happens in the future?

As a specialist in curriculum development, I know the hardships these sorts of scenarios place on part-time faculty. We often do not have access to campus workshops to support us. And we don’t have the expertise to discern what is good from what is appropriate given what we want the students to get out of the courses we teach.

So, what do you do? As you might imagine, the answer is finding an expert who can teach you how to structure a good learning experience for your students.

Here’s where my pitch comes in.

Workshop: The Basics of Curriculum Development

In this workshop, we will go over the basics of building a course. We will use adult learning theory and an understanding of learning outcomes to help create a structure for your course. You will learn the ins and outs of how to create a great course from a great idea. In the end, you will develop a structure for success.

The idea for this workshop came out of a conversation I had with a fellow faculty person. He was expected to teach but was given no professional guidance on how to do so. He wants to learn how to do it, and even has an idea for a course he would love to teach but doesn’t know where to begin.

At the Colégas Group, that is where we step in. We will be open enrollment for our Colegas Curriculum Development Course in early May. Stay tuned for more details as we finalize the details for an exceptional learning experience at an affordable price.