Working From Home as a Professor

Professors that work in traditional settings sometimes need to work from home. Also there are professors that are teaching online education courses that also need to work from home. Here are some ways you can make sure you get your work done.

The key is keeping distractions to a minimum. You may want to start with making sure you are not in a room where a television set is so you become distracted with an engaging program that may be on air. If the space you live in is rather large, you can always keep the television on in another room for when you take breaks.

Try to make sure you have call display on your home office telephone. This will make sure that you can answer important calls, plus avoid unimportant calls that may be from people such as telemarketers for example. This will also help to keep your productivity high.

Make sure you keep a clean and organized space. This will help you to get the most work done. As well, to guard against any technical difficulties on the job, you may want to invest in an external hard drive so you can transfer documents from your desktop and/or laptop just in case your computer may crash. You can also e-mail important documents to yourself where you can have the opportunity to create virtual storage space of your files.

Keeping Your Office at Home and Work Organized

A professor needs to have an office that is organized to stay on top of all the work you need to do.

One way of making sure you keep your office at work organized is to make sure you do keep a lot of papers and assignments hanging around. Take the time to neatly organize these assignments and file them away. One way you can avoid dealing with paper at all is to maintain a paper-free assignment policy with your students. If you use e-mail to have students send you their assignments and mark it using tools in Microsoft Word, this will make sure that you do not have a lot of paper to deal with in your work.

Another way to make sure you are keeping your work environment organized is to make sure your keyboard is clean, as well as the telephone and anything else you may share with other professors. Even if you do not share these facilities, it is still a good idea to keep them clean.

At home, make sure you empty out your waste basket and give a good sweep to the floor of your home office. It is ideal to have home office space, or to at least designate an area as your work space. Make sure you keep all documents organized and file – it is extremely useful to have a filing system and cabinet in your home office, as well as something like this at work.

Getting an International Experience Online

There are ways of traveling the world, right from the convenience of your chair in front of your computer at home.

If you are interested in studying abroad without paying the plane fare (especially with rising oil prices), you may want to consider studying at a school abroad online. Australia is a country that has many of these types of programs.

Griffith University is one of them. You can study online to achieve higher degrees, however you may need to go to visit the school to do a residency requirement if you are doing a degree such as a PhD. The University of Western Sydney is another university where you can such an experience as studying abroad from home. Charles Sturt University is another option, however with this one you may not need to do a residency requirement in order to do a PhD.

The possibilities will become more and more endless in the future as more international universities begin to offer courses online so they can reach students from around the globe. If you are interested in such opportunities, take the time to do your research. You may even have opportunities on the campus where you are presently at to find out about studying abroad programs that you can actually do online. Some of the advantages are that you can still continue to lead your life in your hometown – not missing out on a family, a girlfriend or boyfriend, and your friends. As well, you can make sure your existing contacts will help you to get viable work and spend some of that money on higher education that will help to advance your career.

Making the Decision to Go Online

Walden University has recently come out with a report that Hispanics in the United States are attending their university in droves.

The Hispanic population in the United States is greatly underrepresented when it comes to higher education. Schools such as Walden University give underrepresented groups the opportunity to still obtain higher education and to improve their chances in the workforce when other more traditional institutions may not. There are some good and bad points to this kind of thing.

Walden University is an accredited online university, however does not have the same kind of credibility as a school such as Harvard, Cornell or Columbia. Sometimes in academic circles and in the world of work, the school you graduated from is just as important as the degree you receive. Do schools like Walden University actually make it possible for underrepresented groups to get a foothold in the world of work?

Well, apparently it seems as though it does. Many Hispanics are choosing schools such as Walden because it is giving them a greater advantage in the workforce. As online universities such as Walden become increasingly more credible over time, which is likely to happen, the stigma of studying online will start to go away and schools such as Walden will be seen as a viable alternative to schools such as Harvard.

Managing a Classroom

It is sometimes rare to get a classroom that behaves perfectly. There are always those few students that are having side conversations while the professor is speaking. These are some of the things you can do to make sure you are managing your classroom well.

Sometimes the hard line approach actually can work. By letting students know you will not put up with their disruptive behaviour, this makes the classroom a better learning environment for all students.

Some ways of dealing with the noise levels are the stop speaking until the room has quieted down. This tends to be an effective method that works, without the professor needing to shout.

Another method that tends to work is let the students know that if they are going to make noise in the class...you would prefer they do not show up. If they are going to be disruptive, perhaps they should not show up to class at all if they would rather chat about such things as Facebook.

Another method to ensure that your classroom is orderly is to make sure that you have a participation or a professional conduct mark as part of your class. Make sure to keep track of those students who seem to constantly be the noise makers and make sure you penalize them at the end of the class for being so disruptive. Make sure at the same time that reward those students to actually come to class to learn.

Marking Guidelines for the College Level

Marking can be one of the toughest things that a professor has to do. I have some guidelines that I go by that have been suggested to me by other professors:

You cannot mark all levels of different subjects the same. In general I stick to some basic rules that help depending on the level I am teaching.

If it is a first year class, I generally allow about three to five errors in a written document before I start to deduct marks for grammar, spelling errors and punctuation. Especially at the beginning of the course when many of the students may have come out of high school, I try to make allowances that they are still learning how to write. I do not tend to completely re-write their text, unless there are some major problems. I try to keep in mind that not everyone writes the way I do and that I should let their individuality and creativity shine through their assignments. They are not in school to learn how to write like me, they are there to learn how to write their best.

If it is a second year class, I generally allow only three errors at a maximum before I start deducting marks.

If it is a third year class, I allow about two errors. For a fourth year class I allow one. If the class is a post-graduate certificate class, I expect flawless copy and will start deducting marks at the slightest error of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

I find this to be a fair way to do my marking. Other things I keep in mind when marking is to make sure I am really impressed with the work. If I am really impressed with what the student has done, generally they will receive A standing. If I think they could have put a lot more work into the story or written work, or audio assignment...they receive lower marks.

Technology Tips for Professors to Students

To get students set up on a blog, these are the sites I would suggest:

http://www.wordpress.com
http://typepad.com
http://eblogger.com
http://blogger.com
http://www.squarespace.com
http://www.thoughts.com
http://livejournal.com
http://blogcrowds.com
http://www.vox.com/

These are just a few. There are many, many more.

Podcast Instructions:

A podcast is an audio file sent to the web. You probably already know this. Here are some sites where students can get podcasts going:

http://www.wordpress.com - students may need to pay extra to upload really large files, such as documentaries
****The same goes for all of the ones above

There are other sites that will allow you to upload large files for free:

www.podbean.com
www.podomatic.com

This one may be for a fee:

www.podcast.com
www.podango.com

There are podcasts for just about every major mainstream radio station from the BBC, NPR, CBC, RCI, FAN590, CHFI, etc…

Video Blogs or Video Podcasts:

Video blogs are when students would do a commentary piece, a talk show that is more casual – anything appropriate for student work and/or the nature of the web. Every site I have listed at the top will give a student the ability to upload video onto their blog. As I have mentioned before, there may be an added fee to support the high megabyte size of these files.

Video Podcasts – these are more professional pieces of work put to the web. Either check out or show these two websites are doing Internet TV, and essentially on-going video podcasts:

www.dex.tv
www.therealnews.com/t/

If you would like to see a multimedia online magazine that I have created through Wordpress.com, check out http://kakonged.wordpress.com. There you will find blogging stories, pictures, podcasts, video blogs and video podcasts. I highly recommend you start one yourself if you can find the time so you can show it to your students. It is tremendous fun and I know you would really enjoy it.

More on multimedia magazines...to create an online .pdf copy of a magazine here are some sites:

http://www.joomla.org/
http://drupal.org/
www.xanga.com
http://www.uniflip.com/

Design Information:

If you want a really unique design for your site…here are some sources where if you have some money…you can get it done:

http://www.doodlebuddesign.blogspot.com/
http://wp-design.org/
http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/
http://wp-design.net/
http://wpdesignblog.com/
http://wpdesignpro.com/
http://fleuron.com/?gclid=COaX3_W9npsCFSgYagodyRJ3Bg

This list is always developing and growing.