- General
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Ideas
Should be availability not UNavailability
There is no way to indicate when you’d like to teach or how big you want the class to be. The “unavailability” part is too small and very difficult...
Answer
Hi Caitlyn,
Does Psychology ask the instructors how many seats there should be for a given class? Or is the concern how many sections a course offering will have?
The Teaching Call and Teaching Preferences portion of the application isn't designed to create the activities (lecture, number of discussions, etc.), that piece is coming up in the Activity View.
The Unavailabilities grid is designed to take in when somebody can or cannot teach. They should be able to click and paint the the areas on the weekly grid as to when they do or do not want to teach.
The language is a bit awkward and we can revisit it if we want but it was the committee's decision to ask for "unavailabilities" instead of "availabilities" as the thinking is instructors may not mark enough time otherwise.
Let me know if that makes sense.
I didn't have any faculty complain or have any questions about entering "unavailability" but since I cannot see what they have selected at this point, I don't know if they read it correctly and actually entered when they _could_ teach instead of when they can't. Instructors can always add their thoughts on enrollment sizes, number of discussion sections they want, or any other comments about classroom preferences in the text box at the bottom of their teaching preference form.
The usability of the unavailability grid is important to us so if it seems as though instructors are misusing that component we would be happy to revisit it.
For now, let's go with Meshell's idea of using the textboxes at the bottom of the page to capture how many seats an instructor wants. That hadn't come up in our research before and we need to make sure the concern goes beyond Psychology's process before adding it to IPA.
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The usability of the unavailability grid is important to us so if it seems as though instructors are misusing that component we would be happy to revisit it.
For now, let's go with Meshell's idea of using the textboxes at the bottom of the page to capture how many seats an instructor wants. That hadn't come up in our research before and we need to make sure the concern goes beyond Psychology's process before adding it to IPA.