Gordon Johnson asked about "directed studies." Our compensation scheme is
not too bad in some cases and terrible in others. Here is how it works.
Our criterion for having a class go or not go is 7 tuition-paying students.
(The tuition clause is in there because faculty kids have free tuition and
international students have half tuition. A class of 7 faculty kids is zero
enrollment and a class of 7 international students is 3.5 enrollment. I
guess it's really the dollars that count.) If we have 7 tuition-paying
students registered we get full teaching credit.
For less than 7 the compensation is n/7 of the regular credit. If the
course carries 3 load credits for lecture and 2 load credits for lab, then
the total load credit for 4 student as a directed study would be 4/7 of 5
hours = 20/7 = 2.86.
If your class is mostly full (5 or 6 students) this isn't bad. If you only
have one or two students this is terrible. One good point is that directed
studies require a contract with the student that the "lecture" is only 50%,
and the student must do much more work independently. So if we would
normally have 44 lectures for a full class, we only do 22 lectures with the
directed study. This means the "lecture time" is really a time to go over
completed assignments and then make new assignments, and the course is truly
an independent study by the student, but with sufficient faculty direction
to fulfill the goals of the syllabus.
The problem is lab. The students cannot work unsupervised in lab, so the
scientists get a bad deal on directed studies compared to faculty in
disciplines without labs.
Now here is the real bummer about our policy. What I just described is the
pay scheme for directed studies done in the summer. If we have to do a
directed study in the regular term, the compensation is zero.
I refuse to do directed studies during the school year. I only do directed
studies in the summer if it is a good student with a genuine need. My
summer time is too valuable to spend this way. However, we do have some
young faculty who need money, and they'll take on a whole host of directed
studies in the summer. This is especially true in math. One summer I
remember one faculty member was teaching almost every math course on the
books as a directed study to someone. I think he had something like 12
directed studies involving about 18 students.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817