Adjuncts Teaching Adjuncts

I am an adjunct technical instructor at a community college in Lincoln Nebraska. I have been an adjunct for over 18 years now, in several different states. What I’ve noticed in general is that most community college instructors are experts in their fields, and they have a sincere desire to teach what they do to others.

Their only weakness is that they are not necessarily trained educators. Training is typically achieved through being informally mentored with a more experienced faculty member in their department, maybe sitting in on one or two other classes, and/or maybe taking hit-and-miss short professional workshops that address teaching issues throughout the year. Adjuncts also frequently have to fit all this training into their free time, which gets squeezed in between their primary work and their adjunct teaching.

So I see adjuncts as the glass-half-full. The full part—the water—is their subject matter knowledge. Lots of great stuff there. The empty part—which can vary in volume—reflects their teaching skills.

So my focus this year is to share ideas and tools that could be useful for other adjuncts to think about incorporating into their teaching—and thus adding to the full part of the glass.

Some time ago I gave a series of talks to faculty and staff at my community college about using wikis and/or blogs as another teaching aid. There was a lot of interest, but every once in a while someone would bring up concerns about copyright or intellectual property issues.

I found a site that might appeal to some of us to address that area. Copyscape is a free online plagiarism checker. Just enter your page's URL. And it will search the Web for word-for-word reproductions. It will even highlight the copied text.

http://www.copyscape.com/

It also allows you to include a graphical notification on your web site that you are using this feature.