Professor for one year (week 10): I'm substituting

My current job title in English is "Acting Professor", although I'm not sure if this is correct and what impression people have when they read it.  The German term is "Vertretungsprofessorin", showing my gender, confirming that Germans love compounds, and providing a precise job description, all at the same time.  One also finds this position translated as "Guest Professor" or "Visiting Professor".  However, these two are different as the guest or visiting professor can choose on their own what to teach, a "Vertretungsprofessor" teaches the courses the professor she substitutes for would have taught.  The term "Substituting Professor" seems to cover the duties, but reads rather odd.

I guess, "Vertretungsprofessor" is a rather European or even German concept.  When a professor cannot teach, someone else with equivalent qualifications is substituting for her.  This can be rather planned for professors on sabbatical or for the period after a professor retires and before a new one has been chosen.  Sometimes you can even apply to substitute, because there will be an official advertisement.  Most of the time, the person substituting for a professor will be contacted directly.  So one should have a good network, have an uptodate website, and be prepared to teach something new on short notice.  There are also rather unplanned occasions, when a professor get's seriously ill or even dies, when a professor applies for some kind of sabbatical that might or might not be accepted, or when a professor accepts a new position at another university on short notice.

Several concepts exists how substituting works: Other faculty members or staff members teach single courses as additional teaching load to their regular classes.  Sometimes a course is taught by an external or internal lecturer who is paid for this course as an adjunct lecturer. So the teaching load of the professor is split up between several lecturers.  It's not uncommon in Germany that adjunct lecturers get paid rather symbolically, the paiment is a few dozen Euros per hour taught, i.e., excluding time needed for preparation, grading assignments, or answering students' questions. 

The fact that another researcher -- who in principle would be eligible for professorship -- acts for the professor on sabbatical, is rather special.  The substitute does not only do the teaching, but also overtakes all duties and responsibilities like supervising masters' theses, grading final exams, and attending meetings.  However, most of the time the substitute gets paid according to the PostDoc scale -- i.e., according to the current status of the substituting person.  The University of Konstanz pays acting professors according to the salary scale of the professor who is substituted for.  This is rather unusual, I guess.

However, I'm still a PostDoc, I'm not a regular Professor and I'm not allowed to use this title.  In some occasions a researcher substituting for a professor might even be allowed to use the title during the time they substitute.

Professor for one year (week 9): Lots of trouble

Last week was a busy week.  I spent two days with the GPP13 participants in Riva San Vitale (TI) with lots of discussions and interaction.  Students at the University of Konstanz had to solve assignments on their own in the computer lab.

Before I started the trip to Riva, I got a message that over the weekend somebody committed burglary at the university.  They stole some items from the athletics office.  This office has a connecting door to our computer lab.  And there we had a dozen iMacs and a dozen MacMinis.  All of the Minis have been stolen!

Now this has various impacts:  Most obviously, my colleagues have to deal with the police and probably with the insurance company.  Then we have to by new computers and set them up.  For the moment, the technician is busy with configuring old iMacs to make sure teaching can go on.  I don't know yet how I will conduct the computer-based exam at the end of July.

Not so obvious are some other effects:  The lab is a bunch of stand-alone computers, you start the computer and then log in using a local account.  There is no connection to any net-based disk space.  Everything is stored locally.  That means that everything students had stored on the MacMinis (e.g., programs and notes) is lost.  Some students already had started to work on projects; unless they had stored these data on a private device, this work is lost, too.

So it is always a good idea to have backups on a local device or to send everything to yourself via e-mail.  But of course it would be even better to offer access to net-based disk space.  When you log in, you connect to your university account and you can store everything there.  This also means that you always use your personal account, not a local one.  That's the way computer labs at the University of Zurich work.  So students don't have to remember which computer they worked with during the last lecture and they can access their data from everywhere.  Also OLAT, the LMS used in Zurich provides some personal storing space; students can use this to store data they want to access from different locations or they want to share with student fellows for project work or the like.  Unfortunately, ILIAS (the LMS used in Konstanz) does not offer this.

When I was just recovering from the burglary message, I got another message basically asking, if I was aware that next semester I would not teach the courses I offered to teach some days before -- instead of a research colloquium, I'm supposed to offer a seminar for students enrolled in teacher training for German.  Aha!

This week is a "normal week", I hope.  Next week I will be in the US, again with GPP13.  I hope surprises will be kept to a minimum.

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 7): What is good teaching?

Universities start to hand out "teaching awards".  It's interesting to look at the criteria.

At the University of Zurich, this year's teaching award focused on supporting students during writing a research paper.  The lecturer definitely deserves the award.

However, some statements in the news report made me wonder:  Offering feedback to students' writing, encouraging critical thinking, treating students as prospective colleagues -- isn't that something all lecturers should always aim for in all lectures?  Why is it something special if someone emphasizes self-directed learning?  Why is it notable if someone asks students to hand in a first draft for getting feedback before submitting the final paper?  Why is it surprising that students like challenges?

In my seminars, students have to submit a handout for presentations.  They submit a first version, get feedback, and then the revised version is graded and distributed to all students.  For seminar papers, I demand a proposal including the research question, proposed approaches, and relevant literature.  We then talk about it to improve the problem statement, I recommend further literature, and we discuss the outline of the paper. 

The topics are generally defined rather loosely, giving students the opportunity to make connections to their “other” interests (either outside university or from a different subject) and forcing them to come up with a concrete project proposal themselves.  This requires them to define criteria to estimate success or failure of their project.  This also allows students to judge their own results.  Students rate my courses as challenging but very helpful for understanding a new topic and developing general academic skills.

I always thought, supporting students' learning processes is one of the major tasks of a professor.  Apparently, you can even get an award for your daily work.

Professor for one year (week 6): Maybe the "e" in e-learning in fact stands for "evil"?

These days, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are discussed widely.  They are a success story and they are criticized.  The aspect of "massive" leads to audiences of several thousand students, the aspect of "open" suggests that no tuition has to be paid for attending these courses.  The rest, i.e., "online courses", is a rather old concept.

The development of online courses was one of the key factors of "E-Learning".  Roughly ten years ago, a lot of tax payers' money went into such projects.  Online courses were developed to suit the needs of growing student numbers and to make use of the Internet for teaching ("learn anything, anywhere, anytime").  Students could attend these courses as a replacement for traditional face-to-face lectures.  For example MiLCA was supposed to facilitate learning computational linguistics.  It was developed at the University of Tübingen and some students from the University of Zurich successfully completed the course as part of their studies in Zurich.  However, this was pre-Bologna, i.e., for most of the courses during your studies, there were no formal exams.

Some of these courses are still in use and some universities extend these courses into MOOCs, like the University of Marburg.  They aim to make these courses count towards a BA or MA degree, which means you can earn credit points.

And here the problems start:  To earn credits towards your degree, the attended course has to fit the concept of your study program.  As I wrote last week, the concept of what a module is, differs from university to university.  There might be certain requirements for successfully completing a module like compulsory attendance or an oral exam.  How does that fit into the concept of an online course?  Can a certificate stating completing the online course on phonetics from University of Marburg be used as a replacement for the phonetics course at the University of Konstanz?  Which of the two universities is responsible for quality management?  Who can define how many credit a student can earn?

A colleague even told me that some universities already face a rather odd situation: Students collect online course certificates fitting the overall curriculum of a specific study program and thus avoid attending these courses at their home institution -- i.e., they avoid rather challenging exams, but they want to be awarded the more prestigious degree of that institution.

So if a university starts to accept certificates from online courses offered by other institutions, they open Pandora's box.

Professor for one year (week 5): A module is a module is a module

At the end of the last century, the Bologna process was started.  Studying today is very different from studying some decades ago.  New terms and rules were introduced, names of academic degrees were changed, students should be encouraged to spend some time at other universities, etc.  When you finish your studies, you will receive a Bachelor's degree after three years.  You can then extend your studies by graduating in order to get a Master's degree.  And after this you can do a PhD.  “Bachelor” and “Master” have replaced the German or Swiss “Vordiplom” or “Zwischenprüfung” and the “Lizentiat,” “Diplom,” and “Magister.”

The Bachelor's degree was also intended to allow students to leave university after only a few years, but with a degree instead of as drop-out students.  However, nobody knew whether these new degrees would be accepted by employers.  Switzerland therefore decided to have the Master's degree as the regular graduation degree – the Bachelor's degree is only meant as an intermediary degree, but can be useful if students decide to leave university for some years to get practical experience.

One consequence is that there are only loose requirements concerning the Bachelor's degree if you apply for a Master's program in Switzerland – you merely need a “relevant” Master's degree.  In some universities you can even start attending Master's courses and earn credit points towards your Master's degree before finishing your Bachelor's studies.  I always have students fill out a short survey in the very first lecture; among other things, I ask what they study and in which semester they are.  In Basel, some students stated that they are in a Master's program in the 12th semester – which translates to “I have been studying for 12 semesters and I am now doing a Master's program.”  It's not the 12th semester of this Master's program.  Students see the Bachelor as an intermediary degree.  Often you even don't have to write a Bachelor's thesis.  Which is really strange for studies in the humanities and arts:  You leave university with a degree but you never worked on a longer project or wrote a thesis (i.e., a paper exceeding 20 pages).

In contrast, in Germany the Bachelor's degree is a recognized graduation degree.  For entering a Master's program, you need a "good" Bachelor's degree (grade 2.5 or better on a scale from 5 to 1 with 1 being the highest grade), even if this is not a program with restricted admission (numerus clausus).  So, only the best students are allowed to pursue their studies.  As one consequence, the drop-out rate in German Master's programs is very low.

So, from the administrative perspective, a Bachelor's degree in Germany and in Switzerland means something different.

Another new concept is the “module.”  You have to earn a certain amount of credit points in each of the modules that make up your program.  The modules appear on your transcript of records.  Modularization is intended to make it easier to study some time at another university and to get credit for those courses at your home university.  Of course this would mean that modules in Computer Science or Spanish Literature or Theoretical Physics at different universities are comparable or even equivalent in terms of content, achievable competencies, and time and effort.

So far I have taught at the University of Zurich, the University of Basel (both are Swiss Universities), the University of Konstanz (Germany), and I was E-Learning consultant at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.

At the University of Zurich, a lecture or seminar is equivalent to a module.  Modules are defined in study regulations that have to be approved by the Faculty.  Which means: it is not that easy to change the title, the credit points, or the scope of a module.  If there was a certain course before Bologna, e.g., “Introduction to Programming for Computational Linguists,” this course still exists and is now a module.  Module names and lecture names are identical.  Some introductury lectures used to span several semesters like “Introduction to Computational Linguistics I” and “Introduction to Computational Linguistics II.”  This resulted in the creation of two modules with these names, each containing exact one lecture (and a lab course) of exactly the same name –  wouldn't it made have sense to create one module “Introduction to Computational Linguistics” containing two lectures to be attend in two consecutive semesters?  Well, apparently they didn't think so in Zurich.

As a consequence, a module is worth 3 to 6 credit points, and you have to do a lot of modules to obtain a degree.  From the institutional point of view, this makes it difficult to have courses offered by adjunct lecturers or courses on special topics.  How to create a module with a rather vague name or with a title allowing for change?  It's also difficult if you would like to allow students to earn credits from small projects as part of research projects, from contributing to publications, or from presenting their projects at workshops or conferences.  This shouldn't be mandatory for all students.

At the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, they created a study program from scratch:  Modules are intended to enable students to acquire a set of competences.  A module may cover several semesters, some modules even run through your entire Bachelor's program.  During a semester, students attend certain courses.  However, the concept of a course has been redefined:  There is no longer one lecturer teaching a whole course over 15 weeks.  The lecturer responsible for a module defines learning objectives and an overall theme for a certain course.  Then he invites colleagues to contribute to this course by teaching one or two sessions within this course.  As a student, you are faced with another lecturer each week; as a lecturer, you teach on your area of expertise in various courses.  This concept involves a lot of organisational effort, but I consider it to be a good implementation of the general idea of modules.

At the University of Konstanz, the concept of modules in the Linguistic Department seems to follow the categorization of introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses which would have been named “Proseminar,” “Seminar,” and “Hauptseminar” in the old system.  For some modules all courses are mandatory, for most of the modules you have to earn a certain number of credits but you can choose from a range of courses.  You only have to pass a small number of modules during your studies.  In my surveys, some students thus stated that they are attending my class “to get the last credits needed to pass module 3.”  In the advanced modules there is always a course named “Current Topics in X” allowing to allocate invited, one-of courses by experts – for example, I teach “Methods and Applications in Automatic Authoring Support” this semester as an instance of “Current Topics in Speech and Language Processing.”  This implementation of Bologna is a little more conservative, but also makes sense.  It counters the criticism that university studies are overly regulated, as it allows students to decide on their own which courses they want to take in order to gain the required credits.

Of course, universities should be free to interpret “Bologna.”  However, some interpretations make more sense than others.  Clearly, having different interpretations of “Bologna” also reduces the interoperability of courses and the mobility of students.

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") "\\|"))