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The percentage of faculty who engaged in working outside the academic world is increasing year by year according to the annuals of higher education. As a consequence, a series of questions come along with this tendency that whether academic faculty should be allowed to take part-time jobs relevant to the course they teach, or whether their instructional performance or their home institution would profit from the sideline works. From my point of view, the conclusion in this issue that all faculty need to work outside the campus which would help improve the quality of instruction is still open to doubt.
To some extent, a faculty member’s outside working experience would help widen his horizon, touch with the frontier information of his research area and eventually affect his teaching ideology and quality. Here is a striking example in my university. Professor Wang, a famous scholar specializing in applied linguistics, was invited as a senior consultant by China Friendship Publishing Company and Zhonghua Book Company. Different from other professors in the classroom, Wang often inspires the students to study uninteresting theories with vivid examples from his outside working experience and also guides the students to think how to solve the problems in reality with what they learn. He said:”A professors’ responsibility is to foster students to be useful talents, rather than a bookcase.” Therefore, it is necessary for faculty to work outside the academic world to improve the quality of instruction, as Professor Wang does.
However, it is too hasty and arbitrary to draw the conclusion that all faculty should be required to work outside. That is to say, if faculty members concentrate their efforts outside the college, they would run a risk of reducing their effort, integrity and quality of work at their home institution. Here is another example. Professor Wu works in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Besides, he also started his own business off campus. Recently, many of his students complained that he often brought his outside work to the office and let his students do it. This behavior, his students said, was utterly inappropriate and they could not learn enough specialty knowledge from Wu. Thus, faculty members’ outside work would also bring about some potential problems and ultimately harm the quality of academic instruction.
Therefore, if giving permits to or encouraging the faculty members to work outside for enhancing the educational quality, the college or university must establish some policies in time to regular their teacher’s activities, for instance, prohibiting faculty from getting more positions within the university, limiting the time allocated to the outside work activities, discouraging external non-academic works and requiring faculty to report the scope of paid activities. Although faculty should have the right to engage in the part-time jobs, but this right need to be constricted with the reason of responsibility.
Moreover, encouraging faculty to work outside the academic world could not be the only way to improve the quality of instruction in higher education. For enhancing teaching quality, one university needs to upgrade both hardware and software facilities, for example, introducing new education technologies such as multi-media, whiteboard tools or LCD projectors, enhancing the service quality in the university libraries, reforming curriculum provision and selection system, establishing teaching and learning assessment programs and so forth.
To sum up, understandably, the instruction quality might be enhanced to some extent if the college or university allows their faculty to spend time working outside the academic world, especially the area which has close relationship with the course they teach; however, not all faculty is proper to do this kind of jobs. Furthermore, higher education should not put the entire responsibility of improving the educational quality on the shoulder of minority faculty members who have outside works as well.
提纲:
1 校外兼职有利的方面
2 校外兼职有害的方面
3 如果require 校外兼职,需要采取一些措施,才能帮助提高quality of instruction
4 提高quality of instruction还需要其他方面的手段
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