Professor for one year (week 41): What's in your syllabus?

It's evaluation time again and one of my students wrote in the free form field "What else would you like to comment on":  "I don't know the learning objectives.  I searched the slides and didn't find anything."

I was offended: Why didn't she (it's a girls-only class) ask?  Of course it is in the short description of the class in the Learning Management System (we use ILIAS).  Of course it is in the short description of the class which instructors have to provide to be listed in the study management system where you find schedules, instructor information, etc.  Of course it is on the slides for the very first session -- I always have a proper slide titled "Learning objectives."

But somehow, she had missed the information.  So maybe one slide, five bullet points, or two paragraphs are not enough.

In the study management system, it looks like this:

You find all relevant information, it looks a bit structured, but no explicit learning objectives are given.  They are somehow hidden in the description field.  Instructors are asked to provide certain information (language of the course, material used, kind of exams), but they are not explicitly asked to provide learning objectives.  Maybe there should be even an extra field.

When I realized that other information is missing, too, I looked around how other instructors write a syllabus.  As a case in point I looked for writing related courses and found these:

• EngLit 2570: Materialities of Writing by Annette Vee (Spring 2014)
• English 353: Technical Editing by Cheryl E. Ball (Spring 2012)
• E501: Theories of Composition by Carrie A. Lamanna (fall 2013)

All of them have extensive descriptions on what the course is about, what students will do, what's the motivation behind this course, comments on literature or other material used, etc.  Carrie Lamanna and Cheryl Ball have long explanations about the assignments: What do students have to do, how will the assignments be graded, and how do single assignments contribute to the final grade.  I do communicate these information, too, but I rather announce it in class and don't write it down to be read before the course starts.

Additionally, you can read the instructions for each assignment.   I only have this when I hand out the assignment.  As I found the syllabi after the courses had taken place, I cannot say if the assignments had been published before the courses started or if they had been added once at a time.

Of course it's great to find these sources and be able to use them as inspiration for your own course, but on the other hand, it means you cannot re-use those material for the next course (when I teach a similar course at another university, I often re-use assignments as there is only very little chance that students from university A have friends at university B who took my course).  And the instructors probably didn't use an LMS -- I don't think you put everything in your LMS and have an elaborate website.

If all material had been set up before the course start, this means a lot of preparation effort.  There are lists on which papers to read for which session, sometimes with comments even.  Although I have a schedule concerning which topic to cover in which session, I often search for papers one or two weeks before a particular session.  Maybe I should think about this and really invest a reasonable amount of time in proper preparation for the next classes.  Of course it helps if you teach a course for the second, third, etc. time -- you only have to look for new papers for a certain topic, but you already have all canonical material and you know how to proceed and what works in class.

What I really would like to adopt is the kind of course policy Cheryl Ball has in her syllabus.  It's an explicit list of what students can expect from this class and the instructor, and a very clear statement of what the instructor expects from the students to make this course a success for both parties.

I especially like her comments on grades: "Everyone in this class starts with a B/C.  How you participate changes that grade higher or lower."  And then follow a lot of actions influencing the grade positively or negatively.  For programming courses, when you actually can check student answers against a sample solution, grading might be a bit easier and more formally.  But in courses where there is no single right answer for an assignment, grading is much harder and usually students try to argue about grades.  So a policy on what influences the grade in a positive or negative way is really helpful -- and there should be no room for discussion left.  Everybody knows the consequences of their actions in class.

So I hope to have enough time before the next teaching appointment to spend more time for preparation and start actual teaching a bit more relaxed.

Professor for one year (week 27): Conference season

In the first half of September, I had my conference tour: From a private visit in Paris, I flew to Berlin for two workshops, than back home to Zurich for one day, and than to Florence for a conference.  As I had had no time for writing something to submit to ACL, NAACL, and RANLP, I did not attend conferences in August and unfortunately did not meet with some colleagues.

However, I was invited as speaker at the workshop Corpus-based historical linguistics (CBHL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.  I talked about challenges and solutions for retrieval and annotation of German phrasemes in heterogeneous diachronic TEI corpora, i.e., what I implemented for the OLdPhras project to help phraseologists search phrasemes in Early New High German texts when no linguistic annotation is available.

The next day, together with Michael Piotrowski, I organized the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2013) which also took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.  We had seven interesting talks and an additional invited talk (also with a publication in the proceedings).

Although both events are labeled "workshop", there is a huge difference: The first one was a linguistics workshop and the latter one a computational linguistics workshop.

• For CBHL, all speakers had been invited by the organizer who set the topic and attracted the audience.  Each speaker gave a longer talk of about 50 minutes and then there was some time for discussion.  So a "workshop" is more something like a place for getting to know various research, it's not a place to actually work on something together as it might be the case in rhetoric and composition.  There will be no publication, so this is only for the "Talks" section in your publication list. Sometimes, somebody arranges for a special issue in a journal or an edited volume in a book series and asks participants to contribute to this publication.  So maybe you write an article about the things you presented and some years after the workshop, your contribution is published.
  The work we presented at the Conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora in Manchester in April 2011, finally has been published some weeks ago in a volume of the series Korpuslinguistik und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Sprache (CLIP). Meanwhile, the project for which we announced how to proceed, is finished.
• SFCM 2013, and workshops in NLP in general, are more small-scale conferences: There had been a call for papers (full papers of 10 to 20 pages according to LNCS style, not 300-words abstracts!) to be reviewed in a double-blind fashion by the members of the program committee.  We accepted seven of 15 papers to be published in the proceedings of the workshop and to be presented at the workshop (acceptance rate for workshops is usually higher than for high-end conferences, where you have a 20 to 25% acceptance rate).  All authors got elaborate feedback from at least three reviewers; for accepted papers, authors had to revise their papers considering reviewer comments to submit a final version compliant with given style guidelines 10 weeks before the workshop.  We (the organizers) then edited the proceedings: writing a preface, creating author indexes and table of contents, fixing style violations, rearranging tables and figures -- i.e., creating a camera-ready version of the proceedings.  Everything was then shipped to the publisher who sent galley proofs to all authors and the editors two weeks later.  And one week before the workshop, we received the printed volumes.  So as organizers, there is no work left after the workshop and participants and everybody else can read about the work presented.  It's a very fast process and it helps to make recent research available almost immediately.
  So here, "workshop" is also a bit misleading in general.  However, for SFCM we incorporate a bit of the literal meaning by having a two-hour demo session where participants (no matter if they gave a talk or are listening only) share recent developments, can get help with implementation issues (in 2011, the invited speaker Lauri Karttunen helped fixing some bugs in XFST scripts) and maybe prepare collaborations.

After SFCM, I went to the 13th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng) in Florence.  Although ACM is the professional association for computer science, conferences follow the same schema as in computational linguistics.  At DocEng 2013, I organized and chaired the first doctoral consortium (ProDoc@DocEng).  The symposium took place in a former church, which was an impressive room, but resulted in challenging acoustics.  However, ProDoc@DocEng was a success, the students got a lot of encouraging and challenging feedback, and I will organize the consortium again at DocEng 2014.  There where a lot of interesting talks and activities at DocEng, I met old friends and we made plans for future activities within DocEng.

When I came back after these two exciting weeks, I actually was a bit exhausted and needed some days to sort ideas, links, papers and papers, and catch up with e-mail messages and other deadlines.  However, this is how conference season ends, it's part of the game.

Professor for one year (week 18): Don't call us, we call you

Over the last months, I've applied for several positions as assistant professor or research group leader at different universities in different countries.  All applications were rejected.

No, wait, that's not quite true:  

My application at UT Austin, TX, was rejected three days after submission -- that was fast!  

I applied for two positions at Saarland University, the rejection for the second application was sent out two weeks after submission; for the first application, I asked about the procedure three months after submission -- the answer was something like "Oh, we did send you the rejection some weeks ago, you should have received it."  No, I hadn't.

I applied for a position at the University of Tübingen, they sent a detailed schedule when to expect which action and which week was planned for interviews.  When I hadn't received any information the Friday before this week, I called and was told: "Oh, we sent out the invitations three weeks ago, if you haven't received one, your application probably has been rejected."  Aha.

I applied for a position at the University of Zurich.  Two weeks after submission, I saw the list of invited candidates to give a public talk in a newsletter.  No, I hadn't been informed officially that I was not on this list -- I could see it in the newletter, after all.  When I asked about the formal rejection, the contact person appologized and made clear that she hadn't liked this procedure anyway, but the professors in the commission had told her to not send rejections to the non-invited applicants and that she was not aware that I subscribed to the newsletter.

I applied for a position at the University of Amsterdam.  Half a year later I asked about the process and got a message saying: "Oh, we did send you the rejection some months ago, you should have received it."  No, I hadn't.

I applied for a position at the University of Bern.  Some months after submission, I got an invitation to send my best publications.  Some weeks later there was a message that the whole process was on hold and that I would be informed about the next steps -- in the meantime, I could see on their website that I was not on the list of invited candidates for a talk that already had taken place.  No message came, but there is now a welcome note for the new professor on the institute's website.  When I asked about the formal rejection, they appologized and admitted that it was a bad idea to not send rejections to the non-invited applicants.

I don't get it: in the job descriptions for these positions, they ask for excellent people, they look for the elite.  And then they treat you like a beggar.

And of course all the rejections had nothing to do with me as person and I would be perfectly qualified for these positions and they wish me all the best for further applications.

Addendum September 30: Oh, and I almost forgot that I applied at the TU Braunschweig -- no comment until today, but their website lists the invited talks to be given by August 26 and 27 this year (i.e., one month ago). Thank you very much for not informing me!

Professor for one year (week 8): Hey professor!

How do professors talk to students, how do students talk to professors?  And what about written communication like e-mail messages?

When I was a research assistant and taught programming courses, I used to talk to students on a first-name basis and they also talked to me in a rather informal way, both face-to-face and in e-mail messages.  I did not ask for permission, though.  At that time, I was only five years older than them and some students were even older than I.

But time changes, and now my students start to be only half my age.  As a PostDoc in Basel I still talked to students in an informal way addressing the group as "Ihr" and not as "Sie" and addressing single students as "Du."  At the beginning of the course I asked students if this would be OK and they agreed.  I did not explicitly offer that they could use my first name, but I was fine with that.  Of course, in face-to-face communication, you can often avoid to directly address the other person.  Although most of the students talked to me rather informally, the majority did not use my first name in written communication.  Here they were back to "Frau Mahlow" and "Sie."  So I got messages starting with "Hallo Frau Mahlow" or "Liebe Frau Mahlow."  When answering them, I used the form they had chosen in the first place:  if someone addressed me as "Frau Mahlow", I answered in the formal way, but would still talk to them using "Du" instead of "Sie."  Sounds complicated?  Yes it was.

When I started substituting in Konstanz, I decided to completely switch to the formal style.  So I would communicate with all students in all situations addressing them as "Sie."  That's rather simple.  However, in Germany, academic titles seem to be more important than in Switzerland.  So I get messages starting with "Sehr geehrte Frau Professor Mahlow" (although I am an acting professor, I'm not allowed to use this title), "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Mahlow", "Hallo Professor Mahlow", "Hallo Dr. Cerstin Mahlow" and so on.  Some salutations read rather odd and you can feel that the student was unsure about how to address me -- the English speaking student addresses me as "Dear Dr. Cerstin."

When I started my academic career in Zurich, I thought it was rather awkward that my supervisor was on a formal basis with all students, but as soon as they graduated he offered to use the informal communication form.  Sometimes as last thing in the oral exam.  But now I think that this in fact a good solution; I changed it a bit and with my student assistants I also communicate on a first-name basis before they graduate.  It feels comfortable this way.

Professor for one year (week 4): Talking to myself via e-mail

Did you ever receive e-mail messages where the sender included themselves in the CC?  Sometimes this address is exactly the same as the sender address (and you are wondering if their mail program would not be able to store sent messages), sometimes it's another address of the sender -- for example someone is writing you from a personal account and set his university account in the CC.

A small-scale non-representative empirical study revealed that most of the people cc-ing a message to themselves are professors.

When I was assigned a university mail account, I added this to my mail reader.  I use Ma Gnus v0.6  in Emacs 24.2.  I received the first messages and answered some.  When I looked at my inbox again, I discovered that I had sent myself some messages!

I tested a bit and it turned out that when answering messages to my university account, a CC to myself was added automatically.  When I answered messages to my private account, no CC to myself was added.  Magical!  My Gnus could distinguish my private from my professorial self.

The solution then was easy: I always use "S W" (wide reply and yank) and then maybe exclude addressees.  It's less error prone than deciding whether to use "R" (reply) or "S W" for every answer and then in most of the cases where you should have pressed the "reply to all"-button will send it to one addressee only.

But then you have to include something like this in your .gnus to prevent talking to yourself:

(setq message-dont-reply-to-names
      (mapconcat 'regexp-quote '("cerstin@mahlow.ch"
                 "cerstin.mahlow@uni-konstanz.de") "\\|"))