How to add hours to the day

My problem as a professor has been how to fit everything into the schedule that students really should learn given that universities are under pressure to require less and less. There isn’t an easy answer. Unlike back when I was attending graduate school, riding in on my pterodactyl, most students are now working full-time, which means they have fewer hours in the day to study and attend class. When I took the course I am teaching now, it was SIX hours a week, three of lecture and three of computer lab. Now I have three hours and that’s it, but – and you may have noticed this – computers are still used in statistical analysis.

My solution is to record how-to videos and upload these to the class website. This semester, I started using SAS Web Editor after the semester started so I have to make TWO sets of videos, one for SAS Enterprise Guide and one for the SAS Web Editor.

The SAS Web Editor runs SO much better, though, that I think I will only use it after this semester.

You can compare the two here:

SAS Enterprise Guide (this isn’t even On-Demand. The On-Demand movie was so slow I couldn’t stand it. This was done on a desktop).

This is the SAS Web Editor. It’s much faster and it runs on both Mac and Windows.

There are a lot of benefits of movies like these. They expand instructional time. Students can watch them at their own pace, stop and re-wind.

The disadvantage, of course, is that while it adds hours of instructions the students receive it also adds hours to MY work day. That’s one of the reasons that I only teach one course a year. I don’t want to do it unless I have time to do it well. That’s also one of the reasons I quit being a professor full time. I never felt like I had the time to do as much as I should to teach really well, and I’ve never been able to accept doing “just okay”.