As I have mentioned before, compared to other departments at N1, my department is really short of faculty members. In the last one year, we somehow managed a mostly one-to-one mapping between our courses and instructors per semester, with some of us teaching two courses [one course typically being a higher level course taught to students in upper years ]. However, in the new course structure, we will be teaching two extra courses per semester from next year. We further wish to strengthen our Integrated Master's and PhD programme and add some more courses to it instead if asking these students to take courses with upper year undergraduates.
Combine this with the dwindling number of faculty members in our department and you have a situation in which we will all need to teach two courses per semester.
As I was describing this situation to a colleague from a very well-endowed department, he remarked, "two courses per semester? That's a fate I wouldn't wish for my enemies!"
I appreciate this colleague's concern for my department. Most of my own departmental colleagues have also thought about it. Given that most of us are very young and building up our research programmes, we would ideally like a teaching load of at most one course per semester, just like our friends in the other departments. Nonetheless, we are mentally prepared for this scenario [0].
A colleague, who has been instrumental in designing our courses and has taught multiple courses per semester before, feels that it will not be as difficult as we have ourselves designed our course structure and content. Contributing to a scheme which we feel strongly about will be challenging and will not feel like a burden. I share my colleague's optimism, but am also aware of the challenges of multi-teaching.
In the previous semester, I taught two courses for the first time. Both were taught to moderately sized groups. I had very ambitious plans for both these courses. I wanted to upload typed course notes for both of them because typing things out makes the structure and material very clear in my mind. The plan was to prepare all lectures for course 1 in the coming week on Saturday, lectures for course 2 on Sunday and spend about one and a half hours each daily typing up the notes during the weekdays. This, as I foresaw, would also give me ample time for research.
As it turned out, however, I found preparing the lectures much more challenging and time consuming than I had thought. It would take me the entire weekend to prepare the lectures of one course (the course which I had thought would be easier to teach!) I would prepare the lectures for course 2 during the weekdays and this also took a lot of time. So, I toned down my ambitious plans and was able to put up typed notes only for one course till the middle of the semester. After that, as the pace of the lectures increased, the time spent in preparing them increased even more and I had to give up typing notes for good. I also found myself not able to give as much time to my PhD and Master's student as I would have liked.
Perhaps, teaching both these courses could have been less strenuous if I had taught at least one of them before. With more experience, pursuing this kind of teaching load without impacting research work can also possibly become "second" nature. But, as of now, it certainly is a challenge and entails very strict time management.
In the coming semester, I will be teaching two courses. I have already taught one of them before and have the course notes ready [1]. So, this semester will be an opportunity to upgrade the material and the presentation [2]. The second course will be taken by a Master's student and Integrated PhD student doing projects with me and I have already planned for it according to their requirement. As an additional advantage, this will add to the time I can devote to them. If one has to teach two courses in one semester, this is the optimal course allotment one can hope for and we would want to ensure a similar arrangement for all department instructors as much as possible.
I look forward to hearing from readers about their current teaching loads, their thoughts about it and the load they would ideally like to have.
[0] I am writing this post under the assumption that there are two teaching semesters - autumn and spring. The summer months are non-teaching months. Some senior professors at the institute have floated the idea of offering "soft" courses in the summer semester, but at the moment, I don't want to go in there!
[1] I was supposed to teach a first year course before, but recent changes in the course structure and our departmental composition have necessitated the outsourcing of this course to a colleague from another department.
[2] Teaching the same course over and over again can become boring and uninspiring.
Combine this with the dwindling number of faculty members in our department and you have a situation in which we will all need to teach two courses per semester.
As I was describing this situation to a colleague from a very well-endowed department, he remarked, "two courses per semester? That's a fate I wouldn't wish for my enemies!"
I appreciate this colleague's concern for my department. Most of my own departmental colleagues have also thought about it. Given that most of us are very young and building up our research programmes, we would ideally like a teaching load of at most one course per semester, just like our friends in the other departments. Nonetheless, we are mentally prepared for this scenario [0].
A colleague, who has been instrumental in designing our courses and has taught multiple courses per semester before, feels that it will not be as difficult as we have ourselves designed our course structure and content. Contributing to a scheme which we feel strongly about will be challenging and will not feel like a burden. I share my colleague's optimism, but am also aware of the challenges of multi-teaching.
In the previous semester, I taught two courses for the first time. Both were taught to moderately sized groups. I had very ambitious plans for both these courses. I wanted to upload typed course notes for both of them because typing things out makes the structure and material very clear in my mind. The plan was to prepare all lectures for course 1 in the coming week on Saturday, lectures for course 2 on Sunday and spend about one and a half hours each daily typing up the notes during the weekdays. This, as I foresaw, would also give me ample time for research.
As it turned out, however, I found preparing the lectures much more challenging and time consuming than I had thought. It would take me the entire weekend to prepare the lectures of one course (the course which I had thought would be easier to teach!) I would prepare the lectures for course 2 during the weekdays and this also took a lot of time. So, I toned down my ambitious plans and was able to put up typed notes only for one course till the middle of the semester. After that, as the pace of the lectures increased, the time spent in preparing them increased even more and I had to give up typing notes for good. I also found myself not able to give as much time to my PhD and Master's student as I would have liked.
Perhaps, teaching both these courses could have been less strenuous if I had taught at least one of them before. With more experience, pursuing this kind of teaching load without impacting research work can also possibly become "second" nature. But, as of now, it certainly is a challenge and entails very strict time management.
In the coming semester, I will be teaching two courses. I have already taught one of them before and have the course notes ready [1]. So, this semester will be an opportunity to upgrade the material and the presentation [2]. The second course will be taken by a Master's student and Integrated PhD student doing projects with me and I have already planned for it according to their requirement. As an additional advantage, this will add to the time I can devote to them. If one has to teach two courses in one semester, this is the optimal course allotment one can hope for and we would want to ensure a similar arrangement for all department instructors as much as possible.
In my field, teaching two courses per semester is very common in similar Indian institutes as well as in North American universities. Postdocs and PhD students might have it easier with just one course per semester, but permanent faculty, in a large number of research universities, have a 2:1 or 2:2 course load. Faculty members at places with a 1:1 load consider themselves lucky to have a light load.
Here, however, almost all my colleagues have graduated from institutes where 1:0 load is more of a norm (if not 0:0!) Most had not taught before joining N1. So, a 2:2 or 2:1 load seems daunting because one is simply not habituated to it.
I look forward to hearing from readers about their current teaching loads, their thoughts about it and the load they would ideally like to have.
[0] I am writing this post under the assumption that there are two teaching semesters - autumn and spring. The summer months are non-teaching months. Some senior professors at the institute have floated the idea of offering "soft" courses in the summer semester, but at the moment, I don't want to go in there!
[1] I was supposed to teach a first year course before, but recent changes in the course structure and our departmental composition have necessitated the outsourcing of this course to a colleague from another department.
[2] Teaching the same course over and over again can become boring and uninspiring.
6 comments:
But the condition in NITs is very contrasting where they have to take around 3 courses every semester.
But the condition in NITs is very different where they have to take around 3 courses every semester.
These are my views as a faculty member in an IIT:
1) Teaching one course per year (or less) used to be common in those Indian research institutes which admitted only graduate students. This might have changed though since some of them (say, IISc) have started admitting undergrads.
2) In large research universities abroad, teaching one course per semester while managing a good research programme is not uncommon. But usually there is good TA support. In certain European universities you are required to do tutorials for 6-8 hours every week during term time even if you are a full professor. You can "buy" your way out of teaching with certain research grants there.
3) In IITs, one teaches at least one course per semester (it is more like one theory course + one or half of a lab course per semester in some departments). You can end up teaching on all five days of the week.
4) The instructors can get TAs (funded by the institute) for core courses that are offered to students (~200-400) across departments. Getting TAs becomes difficult when you are teaching an advanced UG (3rd or 4th year) or PG course. The sad observation has been that many of the PG or PhD students are not confident or capable of doing a good TA job for advanced theory courses in IITs. Without a sufficient number of good TAs the load on the instructors becomes high, specially when there are 50-odd students taking the course. In short, IITs provide financial support for getting TAs, but many TAs are not up to the mark. The TAs who do a good job end up having more workload.
5) This is purely from my personal experience: Many old school faculty members in IITs (often HODs) place a much, much higher premium on teaching than research. I think this is because it is easier to demonstrate "apparent productivity" of a department by saying there are a certain number of students on the roll, or someone has personally supervised a certain number of M. Tech. theses (forget about the quality of the work done). So, some departments are starting teaching programmes with certain "buzzwords" without any long term vision. Many young faculty members are struggling against this mindset.
Sorry about typos and the long comment. I needed to get this across. Thanks.
I gave up on typing notes; my course notes are now hand written and scanned. The overhead on typing is not worth it (for me at least). If I ever get around to writing a book, I can consider typing then.
The norm in my and similar physical science fields is 1/1 for research active faculty at large research universities. I taught two per semester a year or do ago, and it was quite tiring. Considering that I have a large group and have to write grants all the time, and the university expects me to bring in the money off of which they skim 1/3 just because, I don't see how it's in their best interest that I teach more... But then again they want to keep the undergrads happy, and undergrads pay a lot more. It is always all about the money in the US. And I have to be selfish more than is my nature, otherwise you get completely run over and squashed... Teaching is viewed as a second class activity, there is no doubt about it...
In this era of free online course videos from top-notch places, I expect that the role of the teacher will change from that of a "musician" to one of a "orchestra conductor", if you will.. That is, the teacher can put together a collage of the best videos on a topic from the internet, run the videos for the class, stop and comment where necessary, take questions, test the students, etc. Why not try that approach to reduce preparation time? Especially if your institution/department is young, short-staffed, and doesn't have the burden of past glory or hoary history?!
A teacher doesn't write a text book for every subject he or she teaches. Same way, why prepare lectures and spend hours lecturing for every subject taught? Why not spend that time on providing more of personal guidance, help, and monitoring to the students watching your collage of the best third-party videos/lectures?
What you may be in need of is "Teaching Nouveau"! I have elaborated on that in my latest blogpost.
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