[TOS] Fwd: An experience report....

[Gregory Hislop]

I think the evaluation issue for untenured faculty is an excellent point.  But the issue that actually occurred to me first is teaching efficiency.  Time spent learning FOSS or solving FOSS problems takes time away from other tasks, and faculty time is scarce.  Teaching courses as already developed, and teaching straight out of a text just takes less time.  Too much time on the bleeding edge is likely to leave faculty with not enough time for other aspects of teaching and scholarship.  

Some faculty are willing to take higher risk paths and pursue things like student FOSS participation because they see the potential high payoff.  Many faculty will not do that.

Greg Hislop

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of C. Titus Brown
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 11:05 PM
To: Matthew Jadud
Cc: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] Fwd: An experience report....

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 10:58:07PM -0400, Matthew Jadud wrote:
> Hi Ralph,
> 
> 2011/9/5 Ralph Morelli <ralph.morelli at trincoll.edu>:
> > widespread acceptance of this approach.?? If experienced faculty, such as
> > you and Allen and I, have problems incorporating FOSS into our courses,
> > it's even worse for young faculty who have to worry about tenure.
> 
> Could you explain more, for this community, why it is "worse" for
> untenured faculty attempting to integrate FOSS projects into their
> teaching?

Hi Matt,

because generally us untenured schlubs are more susceptible to negative
student reviews like "this prof had no idea what they were doing".  For
tenured profs, the consequences are generally not so bad unless performance
is consistently bad; for untenured profs, bad performance is (or can be)
factored in to promotion, raises, and teaching assigments more strongly.

If you have to worry about whether or not your ability to compile *this*
version of the Linux kernel on the fly in front of class is going to
have consequences, along with simply trying to get it to work in the
first place, life will be stressful.

Personally I've found that my students are pretty happy to watch me fail,
and that they learn the right lessons from it -- that every success is
founded upon many failures.  But it's something I work hard to convey,
and if I failed a lot in class I suspect it would make its way onto
evaluations and hence be a subject of my annual review.

cheers,
--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
tos at teachingopensource.org
http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos