Step Up to the Plate, Marquette Professors
Written by Katie on May 2, 2007 – 8:09 pm - Welcome, if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to our email newsletter. Thanks for visiting!
Not only did Marquette’s student government get it right, they did it fast. Brock Banks and Sara Soriano have already instituted one of the biggest components of their campaign, the Pick-A-Prof system.
There’s something exciting, empowering, and relieving about having a forum to rate and review professors. But the best thing about Pick-A-Prof could potentially come from the professors themselves.
Besides allowing all the rating, reviewing, and book exchanging any student could want, the site offers a shocking twist. Professors can upload information about their courses and themselves, under sections labeled “Biography” and “Course Descriptions & Expectations.”
What? You mean actually give students information about what they’re getting themselves into when they register for classes?
It would be great to see this required rather than made an option. But in a way, the fact that it is merely an opportunity should say something about the professors who choose (and those who choose not) to take advantage. Professors should have no reason to be bashful or secretive about what is offered in their courses. Students should be able to have access to this information before signing up. In terms of accountability and transparency, it’s a win-win situation for concerned students and responsible professors alike.
There is no doubt that students will jump right on the opportunity to voice their opinions about their classes and the people that teach them (they’ve already started). The challenge for all professors now, for their own sake and for the sake of the students, is to also rise to the occasion. Whether or not that happens will be fun to watch. Will Marquette professors see this an an infringement on their closely-guarded academic freedom? Will those professors that give out information see their classes fill up more (or less) quickly?
I’m looking forward to seeing how and who of the Marquette faculty responds to this opportunity.
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Posted in Marquette Golden Chickens |
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Dr. Peggy Bloom, Marquette’s vice provost, has been looking into the technology to post all course sylabi online before the semester begins. This would enable every student to view a sylabus before even registering for a course. She said she hoped to have the technology ready in time for next year but I have not heard anything about it lately.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:46 pm
This is something completely unrelated to Pick-a-Prof.
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:43 pm
One of the things the COC tried to implement was putting syllabi on the Web site…. http://www.marquette.edu/comm/curriculum/coursesyllabi.html
Let me just say, it was never a matter of technology. This semester’s syllabi didn’t get up there because of disorganization on the parts of teachers or admin. Either teachers didn’t submit them to the admin in COC soon enough, or Admin didn’t turn them over to technolgy… but students never had these in time to see if they wanted to register for a particular class or even withdraw.
May 3rd, 2007 at 7:44 am
You’d think that professors would get on board with this right away to weed out potential slackers. I know I’ve taken a few courses that, had I known ahead of time what I was getting into, I absolutely wouldn’t have taken. As a result I rarely went, I did the bare minimum to get by… something tells me professors don’t want those students in their classes, and this is about the best way I can think of to potentially stop the problem before it starts.
It will be interesting though to see what professors don’t take advantage. Seems to me it would be a nice commentary on how much they care.
I’d also be curious to see how many course descriptions are essentially the same thing. I’ve taken something like 5 classes at MU in the last 4 years in which we read essentially the same things and talked about the same topics, yet the course titles were all different so it created the illusion that I’d be getting some different material. Perhaps this will also be an opportunity for profs to cross-check their material across other disciplines to make sure stuff is relevant to other course content, not a carbon copy of it.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:23 am
I think yana has a good point. It’s not about technology; these bureaucrats have been talking up a storm for as long as I’ve been at MU about “putting every professor’s syllabus online.”
It will never happen for several reasons:
1) Bureaucrats are lazy.
2) Putting syllabi online would force professors to be more accountable for the material they teach because students would, as mu socialist pointed out, have a better understanding.
3) Bureaucrats are lazy.
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Brian you forgot #4 — Bureaucrats are lazy.
Also, does Pick-A-Prof give students the same freedom that DogEars did to rate professors and leave comments? I wonder if that information would actually resonate with some professors here… I often think that some of the faculty couldn’t care less what the students think of them, and it shows in how they conduct themselves in the classroom.