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[ntchanga]

First of all, my apologies in advance for the length of this post.  I'm a newbie to the forum and a newbie to on-line teaching. 

I was asked to teach 4 courses in a new F2F (non-degree) certificate program offered through the continuing ed. dept. at a local university.  I will be a contract employee and will be paid an hourly rate for the teaching contact hours only.  Well, after turning in my course syllabii, the HOD mentioned that the university wants to offer the course on-line in the future.  They want to videotape ALL of my courses and then use them for distance ed later.  I would then be hired as a distance ed instructor for those courses.  The HOD did not mention any specifics about pay or how these future courses would work.

I did not know how to respond when the HOD told me this.  My initial reaction was that it would not be effective.  One of my courses, for example, meets for 10 hours (or 2 five-hour sessions on consecutive  Saturdays).  I planned to have lots of group activities, discussion, analysis of transcripts, short video clips, etc.  I cannot imagine how any distance ed. student would be able to watch other students working in groups, asking questions, etc. for such a long time!  (I'm not even sure how I'll manage 5 straight hours of teaching F2F myself!)  When I tried to raise my concerns about the effectiveness of this (I even offered an alternative by suggesting short podcasts of impt. content paired with weekly class on-line discussion), the HOD stated that the university had been doing this for 10 years and had it down to a science. When I have students doing group work, there will be a microphone on the desk picking up everything they say so that the students who watch it in future courses will feel like they are there participating with the group.

I tried to ask about the ethics and legality of the students being videotaped and then shown to future students and was shut down again.  "We have never had any trouble with this in the past.  It's not like we're posting it on You Tube for anybody to see.  It's used by the university for educational purposes and is available only to those students who register and pay for the course." 

I also cannot imagine being videotaped for 5 hours at a time, especially the first time I teach a class in a brand new program!  I have been videotaped in the past, mainly for self-observation to better my teaching, and found it extremely painful.  I find it a challenge to teach a new course and I always like to tweak and make changes in future courses for things that didn't work as well as I had wanted.  It makes me insecure to have to teach a course for the first time and have it videotaped.  Add in the fact that I would be videotaped for 5 hours at a time.  I feel sheer panic thinking about it.

Finally, I have an unsettling feeling that I'm being taken advantage of so that the university can make money.  As an hourly, contract employee, what are my options?  I don't want to burn any bridges, but have had a hard time bringing up any of my concerns with the HOD.  I want to discuss this with a couple of the other instructors for the program to find out if they are concerned, but fear that I would be unprofessional going behind the HOD's back.

Are there any other issues I should be concerned about or am I just being ridiculous?  What would you do in my position?

Thank you all in advance for your advice! 

[larryc]

You are being a little ridiculous. I did the same thing at my old school. We ended up not using the tapes after all--but you can cross that bridge when you come to it. Just teach the course and do your best.

[erikjensen]

Your department head appears to be clueless or indifferent regarding how to create and run a good online course. Videotaping a F2F class and throwing it up on the web is terrible course design. "Feeling like they are part of a group" is not the same thing as actually participating in a group discussion. It sounds like they want to create an online course on the cheap and they will get what they pay for. The bulk of your concerns are totally valid, but it sounds like you don't have a lot of leverage here. I'd say suck it up for now, but have it in your mind that you will slowly mold the online courses into something better as you teach them in the future.

[kohelet]

I would share some of your concerns.  As erikjensen rightly points out, anyone who has looked at the online pedagogy scholarship and "best practices" literature will know that a great f2f class does not make a great online class.  Since you'll be the online instructor, though, maybe you'll have control over what gets used (e.g. a 10-minute segment of a fantastic lecture) and what gets dropped (eavesdropping on group work, which I agree is totally bizarre and an unfair distraction to your f2f students).

Regarding the intellectual property rights/exploitation issue . . . When we started taking online teaching seriously, our university developed an intellectual property rights policy specific to online teaching content.  Basically, the individual instructor and the university both keep rights.  If your university doesn't have a policy in place, you may want to hunt around for examples of such policies so that you can at least summarize for others what's typical.

Not earthshaking advice, I realize--mostly just offering sympathy.  I'd be curious to get updates on this.

[klwilcoxon]

Note to self:  Passive learning, in any form, is BAD or NONEXISTENT learning.