Lin Marklin
EDT 6460
Due April 10, 2006
lin.m.marklin@wmich.edu

Assignment IX – Future Career Plans (50 points)

Introduction

I am currently 42 years old, and I plan to retire at age 60, or in 18 years, so I will be leaving the full-time workforce in 2024. I plan to teach at Kellogg Community College for the rest of my working career, but the curriculum I teach and my job descriptions are going to change slightly, and I am well positioned to adapt to these changes. What I will be doing between now and 2020 is to continue what I am doing now to stay abreast of the advances in learning technologies and to champion their appropriate use in my college.

Currently, I teach English and literature at the community college level. Per my insights on Assignment 6, I do not believe that my job will be outsourced or off-shored. There is a strong teachers’ union at KCC, and the bottom line is that most community college students need face to face instruction. In fact, the number of full-time instructors at my college will increase if America responds to the flattening of the world by putting more emphasis on education and by better funding a minimum of two-years of education after high school. This focus will result in a large increase in the head count at the community colleges level because community colleges are well positioned to absorb the increased enrollments of the under-prepared students, and many community college are well equipped to handle retraining needs. While my job position will not go away, there are three things that will change over the next 15 years: what I teach, how I teach, and where I am when I teach will change.

Changes in what I teach.

As an English and literature instructor, much of what I teach is basic composition and research skills. In the next 15 years the focus of my job will shift to include information literacy, copyright, proper use of sources, and synthesis of knowledge. Information literacy has become a part of my individual curriculum in the past few years, but I am the only person in a department of 11 full-time instructors to include information literacy. This will change. Our department needs to provide college students with the skills they need to locate, evaluate, and use electronic sources. Current and future college students need these skills, and the English department is the logical place for such teaching. I think that within 5 years information literacy will become one of the objectives for our core composition courses. Copyright and proper use of sources is already part of the composition curriculum, but these skills will become more of a focus than they are now. At the college level, teachers are now seeing students from the copy and paste generation, and the vast majority of these students were not told in high school that this type of plagiarism is wrong. When I was in school, kids copied from encyclopedias, but when the encyclopedia was not available, kids actually did their own thinking. Now, so much is available, and students need to learn the proper use of and respect for the ideas of others. Finally, knowledge synthesis will also be more highlighted in the curriculum that I teach. With such a large amount of information available, students will now need to develop good filters for detecting what is useful, what is useless, and how all the pieces fit together. I am adapting to the three changes I see in the composition curriculum by completing this degree in Educational Technology, by attending technology related conferences, and by reading applicable journals. I am well situated to adapt to the changing needs of my department, and I anticipate that I will actually be enlisted to teach the needed skills to my colleagues.

Changes in how I teach.

In addition to what I teach, how I teach will also change in the next 15 years. Specifically, the way I teach in my face-to-face classrooms with change. In the past three years, I have made all of my teaching material available on-line. This is something that my colleagues will be doing in the near future in response to student need for 24/7 access and due to a desire to become more paperless. Making all teaching and learning material available via the web is one way that how I teach is changing, and I have adapted to this change be becoming adept in the development of web pages. At this point in my career at KCC, I have begun helping my colleagues to develop their skills in web publishing, and I anticipate doing more of this volunteer work in the future. Even though the extensive help I give my colleagues in this area in unpaid, by teaching, I learn more, and my learning more I am ensuring my continued employability. .

Another change in how I teach in the next 15 years is I will focus more on using modules and allowing student to progress at their own pace instead of having a ‘one approach and one pace fits all’ mentality. I will allow students with proven mastery of certain desired skills to ‘test out’ of required modules. These changes will come in response to the desire of the administration to become a more customer driven college, the desire to individualize education, and the need for our college to compete on a national level. In the next 15 years, I also see me relying much more on software for remediation of basic grammar and syntax problems. I do that a little bit now, but the use of this technique for developing specific skills in under-prepared students will be much prevalent in the future as more and more ‘smart’ software become available and as the community college begins enrolling students who encountered this type of software interventions in the K-12 system. I am well positioned to make these adaptations because of my love of learning new things and my interest in technology.

Changes in where I am when I teach.

The last thing I see changing in the next 15 years is where I am when I teach. Currently, faculty members are expected to be on campus all 5 days of the work week, even if they just come in for 30 minutes on the days they do not have classes scheduled. Eventually, telecommuting will become more acceptable, but it has yet to be worked into the contract. Just this past year faculty members were contractually allowed to have online chat as 1 hour of their 7.5 required office hours. Some faculty members chose to schedule this hour on Friday, and they then did not come to campus on that day. The administration is now saying that is not acceptable, but the union is working on it. I think KCC is seeing the beginning of the end for mandatory commuting to campus for full time employees. In a similar vein of encouraging online teaching activities, full-time instructors are restricted in the online sections be a less than 50% expectation, per our current contract. This means that for an instructor with a 5 class course load, no more than 2 sections can be online. This will probably change and qualified instructors will be encouraged to teach 3 online sections, which would be 60% of their teaching load. I am very well qualified to make the shift to a more virtual teacher. I became certified as an online instructor through a six week class offered via the Michigan Virtual Learning Collaborative in 2001, in fact Tracy DuBay was my learning partner. I have successfully taught online for 5 years, and I am continually improving my distance learning pedagogy.

Conclusion

My job is going to change, and I am ready. I have the skills I need to use the current learning technologies and to learn the new technologies as they are developed. My love of learning will enable me to stay current with what is available, and my knowledge base and practical experiences will help me to determine what technologies will enhance learning and what technologies are just fluff. I am excited to see what the future brings, and I am confident that I can meet all the challenges. .