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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a professor too. You are somewhat accurate in what you describe but so much of that is irrelevant or without context. Scheduling classes two days per week? You realize teaching is contractually about 40-50% of the job, right? When are they supposed to do their other work? Answering questions on a phone? That's Kahoot. It's fun and not bad at all. AI, budget cuts, that's across the board. Unavoidable.

Chill. [/quote]

These were my thoughts, exactly.  The teaching schedule thing has been happening for 30 years (or more).  I think the OP's objection is that faculty aren't in their offices available to students every day.  But that's never been unusual for a tenure track faculty member.  And honestly, the vast majority of designated office hours are completely unused, so even when faculty are in their offices and encouraging students to attend, they don't.  So how many days per week that occurs isn't very important.  My colleagues who prefer to work in the office 5 days per week probably don't spend any more hours with individual student contact than my colleagues who prefer to work at home three days per week (everything else equal).

The phone thing is intended to INCREASE engagement in a class.  In an old fashioned class, a prof asks a question, 3 or 4 students raise their hands, and 1 is selected to answer.  When faculty use Kahoot or other similar software, every single student is expected to answer, and the prof can see if students are answering the material (i.e., if they should speed up or if they should go over something again).

Finally, if the point of the post is to say that faculty (teachers) are more engaged in the student experience at some universities than others, then that's absolutely true and has always been true.  Small liberal arts colleges have a culture for smaller classes, more faculty accessibility, and a more nurturing student-faculty experience overall. Not all of them.  But you're more likely to find that experience at such schools.  Faculty are hired, evaluated, and rewarded proportionally more on their teaching (rather than scholarship).  There's also more of a culture of going above and beyond for students (bringing cookies during finals or whatnot). The more highly ranked "research universities" are typically structured so that a professor's performance is assessed as approximately 30% teaching (the rest goes to scholarship and/or administrative work).  And in that setup, you can expect faculty to look for ways to do the teaching portion more efficiently.  They are not worse in the classroom (faculty are still evaluated on teaching and there are still norms to do a good job in the teaching domain).  But faculty are more likely to prioritize finding blocks of time for their research.[/quote]

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