On Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:47:08 -0400, Bill wrote:

wrote:
On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:13:58 -0500, wrote:

On 8/13/2011 9:40 AM, Leon wrote:

Totally agree with that article you posted the link to, especially the
Honors College comments, The students get first pick at the professors
and have much smaller more personal classes.

It's hard to believe that 70% of the undergraduate classes at most
universities are now taught by outsourced, "paid-by-the-course", adjunct
professors!

A sad state of affairs ... this corporate model of teaching was unheard
of in my day.

It's not new. I taught a senior level CS course and a graduate level MIS
course 30 years ago. At one point I asked the dean if I taught all the
required courses, if I got my masters (I only have a BS). He didn't like the
question.

Sometimes there are people in industry who know more about a subject than you
can find to teach.

That may be very true, but that doesn't mean it's safe to assign them
total responsibility for a class if they haven't taught before.

And the choice is, don't teach the class?

What is likely to happen is that the "industrial expert" is likely to
assume too much.

That happens. In fact, I assumed that seniors in CS would have some idea how
to program a computer and even know something about binary arithmetic. I'm
not above learning, however.

That surely doesn't mean those industrial experts can't be put to good
use. The students love such invited speakers like that.

What good is an "invited speaker", when the subject of the entire course is
the adjunct's specialty? You assume education majors know something worth
teaching.