Of course it’s most profitable to rip off the students and to raise the tuition regularly for little or no damn reason!
Do you want a prize or somehing for pointing that out? Or do you think we should be proud of the colleges for figuring that out?
I don’t agree that adding the clicker to the classroom is a rip-off, however. It can improve the educational experience, AND it can give the faculty more time. That time can be leverage by the college in a variety of ways that will benefit the student as well.
Dude, you’re the one who said it would be profitable for the school to cover the costs.
If the thing is required equipment, and there’s no way to alleviate the cost (share with a friend, buy used, etc like you can do with books), it might as well be added to the tuition. Sure you’re still paying for it, but the cost doesn’t get sprung on you after enrolling.
I said that if this is true:
then it would be profitable for the school to cover it without ripping off the students - with the idea being that that they would be well-justified in covering it themselves as an internal matter. The fact that the school can generate even more profit for themselves by gouging the students for money and possibly pillaging their piggy banks as well doesn’t answer my point; it merely points out the rather obvious fact that the bigger the shaft you give the students the more money you’ll make. Which is of course all the school cares about.
Yeah, and why the hell does my tuition have to cover the fund for my professor’s copy machine access? A Bic pen that writes for two miles costs, what, five cents, and it takes like twenty seconds to write out a page of instructions. Professors get all of the benefits from copy machines and I get nothing out of it!
Again, if the OP feels the professor is utilizing the clickers poorly, I’m can get behind it. But it doesn’t shock my conscience to learn that the OP has to pay for them, although the $8/semester registration fee seems like a bit of a rip-off to me as schools can handle that function internally with other systems for free.
As noted my point is, if the professor’s time is so valuable and will be sufficiently saved by this device, then the OP was already paying for the clickers - adding the clickers would reduce the amount you’d reasonably expect the students to have to pay, since using them saves the teacher’s valuable time that the student would be using up by requiring his homework to be graded or whatever.
The way the OP describes the situation it’s additional charges for no additional services rendered. SOP for colleges, one supposes…
The way the OP describes the situation it’s additional charges for no additional services rendered.
Unless making lectures more engaging and therefore helping students learn more is a “service rendered.”
Universities (my background includes knowledge of universities - not colleges) make most of their money from four places:
- Donations
- Grants and their indirect cost recovery ratio
- Tuition and Fees
- Direct government funding (if a public school)
Government funding is drying up. Donation can not be predicted. Grants are used for research (and help pay for your library and the school’s network as well). That leaves tuition as the only place left to handle recurring costs. Now, items like clickers do not belong on the tuition bill anymore than books, paper, pens, computers, or a bike to get to campus. Schools also charge you for parking rather than bundle it in.
It is NOT a shaft to make students purchase supplies - it is simply part of the cost of attending. I teach at a business school that requires the students to buy a laptop with the latest software. I teach where students have to provide their own blue books and scantron sheets. I teach where, in some classes (though not my own), students have to get the clickers. The cost of those supplies is a minimal percent of the cost of attending the school.
Now, if you want a well regarded school name on your diploma, then you want the faculty spending the maximum amount of time in research. If you want MORe of my time in office hours, etc. - then you do NOT want me spending that time grading quizzes if it is at all possible. I promise, grading time will not be taken out of research time - it will be taken out of student interaction and classroom prep time. It is in the student’s best interest to make it easier and faster for professors to grade papers / quizzes / exams / homework. When it is harder, then the class content suffers.
If I can quiz you live, I can tell if you are understanding the content. That helps me determine if I can move on, or if I need to continue focusing on a particular subject. The clickers let the silent majority make their voice heard - and when used properly are a very powerful tool. I can add a 5 question quiz to every class to force you to do the reading. By doing that, you WILL get more out of my class. 13.5% of you will hate me for it - and you will write nasty little bits on my eval forms. Enough of you will thank me for making you do the reading, rather than trying to skim your way through my class.
Now - the prof mentioned in the OP does not appear to be using the clicker to its utmost capacity. Then again, when I first move my content to powerpoint it sucked too. It took a term or two to get used to the new system (and then even longer to find a model for distribution that still got butts in seats for my scintillating lectures).
The reality is that the sum total of time allocated for grading is fixed. By having better methods, more assignments of different types can be given.
When I have a 400 person class, I stick to three multiple choice scantron exams and one short paper. When I have a 50 person class, the exams are short answer and many papers. With electronic quizzing available, I can do more examination of the students than before.
(note - I don’t use the clicker - my students all have laptops instead).
You got that from the OP?
And Algher, your efforts to get me to pity the poor, poor university and the OP’s poor, poor professor are surely well-intentioned, but it doesn’t change my thinking on the matter one whit. As one who paid for lots of useless or extremely poorly used required accessories in college (including certain textbooks), I feel no sympathy for when the university decides they need the students to pay for the school’s shiny new toy. YMMV, obviously.
My Univ. supplies clickers & anything else I require to teach effectively.
I give very, very careful consideration to what I require students to purchase (including the “latest edition” of the textbook when perfectly good used copies of the prior edition are available).
I’ve taught at universities that require students to purchase clickers and I’ve worked at universities that provide them. It seems to me that the biggest determinant in that choice is whether or not clicker use will be a university-wide initiative. For one class, they are easy to provide. However, when classes across the university are using them, it is near impossible to provide one for every student. So, they are purchased like books or lab supplies or class note packets or even laptops. It is important to note that the university is not making money off of the clickers. The prices I have heard are pretty much what you pay direct from the manufacturer. No markups for the bookstore. And certainly the $12 registration fee goes straight to the manufacturer.
Smiling Bandit, I expect you will use your clicker in other classes. I sincerely hope that you will have one or more professor who uses them well. They really can be great for all of the reasons that have already been elucidated.
And, for those of you how think that this somehow saves a professor time, forget it. It takes more time to incorporate the clickers (even poorly) than it does to prep the same lecture without them. In many cases, the lectures must be completely redesigned to incorporate the technology.
I didn’t think it was “fair” either and I’ve been an adult for one hell of a long time so welcome to the world of whatever it is you consider it to be.
No, because the OP didn’t put enough thought into the whole enterprise to determine what benefit there might be to the use of such technology.
I helped move my daughter into her dorm with help with her mother. After sweating our asses off we head to the book store.
We were trying to guess how much it would be to relieve the tension. I guessed 650.00 and she guessed 725.00.
Total cost : 830.00 and some change. She won the bet. 
Forget that, let’s talk about the “closing costs”. That thing where you pay them to let you buy a house. Not paying them for the house, just paying for the experience.
And if you don’t want to be in a seminar where you need the America’s Funniest Home Videos setup to have any interaction with the professor, they do have schools where you can sit close enough to see his/her face.
This. In fact, it would actually be FAR more cost-effective to actually pay someone to grade papers! The total cost (which some people seem to be completely forgeting) is 20$ plus batteries plus 12$ a semester for the toy which does nothing paper can’t, because they don’t change their pedagogy based on what we feed back to them.
The quizzes are simply used to find out whether we read the book in advance, which is actually not in the least bit helpful in the class.* Not if we read the book, or understood it, but simply whether we memorized enough random facts to regurgitate them before we came to class. Understanding the material? Not important, apparently. :dubious:
*Some professors absolutely love this idea. In a few rare cases it makes sense, such as where intense discussion or lots of skills practice are involved. Mostly, however, it is extraordinarily meaningless. I come to lecture to get both the overview and the important subpoints. If I can get them from the book directly, why do I need a teacher? (The answer seems to be that the teacher won’t stamp “A” unless you jump through her petty little hoops). Since the teacher does not encourage discussion, at all, and does not help with matrial peopel don’t understand, the entire exercise is literally a waste of money. The entire Earth is that much poorer for it.
There are none which even remotely justify the cost. Sadly, since I’m paying for the cost, the teachers and their departments are not. At all.
See, we have this nice other department which handles Clickers (amonst other things). The professor needs to do almost nothing, since they bring the software, install, set up the receiver, etc. The software on it handles all the dirty work. Heck, the professor doesn’t even have to register us, since the department hands off all the information to the Clicker company!
This, in fact, is the icing on the cake. I’d almost be fine with paying for the damn clicker. However, there’s no reason technology wise that I should have to pay any registration fee, ever. The clicker and the receiver do all the work. It doesn’t need to connect to their master server, since it shoudl be able to connect on our end. But this way they can charge access fees.
Except you can already do that, more cheaply, with paper. And thus far I see nothing to indicate the teacher intends to pay attention to this. In fact, she seems to take great delight in screwing us over. Thus far the quizzes are ridiculous jokes designed to mess us as much as possible. She does not even necessarily tell US what the right answer is, and certainly not WHY. And she sprung on us, in class, during the middle of the quiz, after a week of classes, that we needed a caluclator. Immediately. Not after class. For the quiz we already started.
Let me put it this way: every good, solid, communicative professor I’ve known has nothing to do with them. This is solely an ego-stroke for the assholes. Hell, the professor picked the single worst textbook I have ever seen. This thing is a mess of disconnected points and peices of unconnected information, bound in a ridiculously colorful array of jumbled charts and disgrams whose connection to the text is minimal, at best. As an example, it says there is such a thing as ;'Six Sigma," and that it vaguely somehow has to do with quality, but not what it actually is, making the entire passage pointless. The teacher then quizzes us on the most mundane or unimportant information, such as asking which one of some four options was an important concern in manufacturing in the 1970’s. (In fact, though her answer was out of the book it was also somewhat wrong. Several of her official answers are.) The question, of course, was essentially meaningless and had little or nothing to do with what we needed to learn. Knowing the answer would never help us in any way, shape, or form to do good work or manage effectively. It was even listed in the text as a “here’s a minor sidebar that you don’t need to know but if you want some background this could help.”
Now for the obligatory flame.
Ahem
*You are an ignorant buffoon. Pray tell, you fuckwitted dimwitted barely-conscious pondscum sucking the anus of worthwhile humanity, did you ever stop to think that maybe, maybe, that a professor’s dumbass whim was not worth any amount? No, you didn’t, because your retarded reptilian hind-brain can’t handle concepts like “value” or “cost-effectiveness”. Or, for that matter, that I mjight know whether the professor was a good or bad teacher based on actual experience with the useless shitpile. No, that’s too compolex for you. Instead, you are basing your wild-ass guess on your own personal opinions, held apparently without any knowledge of the actual facts. Instead, you jumped on me for being pisssed off over having yet another fee being tacked on the pad some company’s pockets and stroke some teacher’s ego, when neither she nor the department intends to use that technology in a responsible and useful manner. You are a lean mean penny-pinching pocket-picking filthy no-good double-dirty-crossing thrice-double-damned son of a bitch.
Congratulations. Of the three incredibly useless, stupid people I have had to deal with today, you are actually the worst. This is actually the worst day I’ve had in a year, and you actually claim the prize! I can conceive of no possible world in all the galaxies in all the known or known universe in which you hold any value whatsoever. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.*
Eh, I have to have one sometimes. You’re as good (read: bad) a target as any.
I also want to laugh at all the pathetic counter-whining I see.
An honest complaint, I find amusing. What really jollies my britches, though, is when I see people complain that someone else hasn’t been screwed enough, although they have been screwed. Some peole are apparently so hard up for shadenfreude that the very fact that someone isn’t a target thereof irritates them.
The logic, as near as I can tell, seems to be that "Well, someone unjustly demanded something from ME, so someone else ought to unjustly take something from YOU. People have complained about “supplemental property tax bill”, or home Closing Costs. The difference, as I see it, is that I don’t complain that you haven’t been shafted hard enough by those things. I think they are unjust in part or totality. I sympathize. But I guess some people don’t want to make things better as much as drag everyone else down.
Pathetic. You’re part of why the world is a shithole.
I had to buy a clicker for a class once. You could get them from the bookstore and they were $20 or so. I liked using them, it was a huge class and we did a lot of poll-type stuff that was cool.
Shitty part was, while you could charge the clicker on your student account (how most people bought books etc, either mom and dad paid your bills from this or you got billed later) you also had to pay to register the fucking thing and make it work! And you could only pay by debit/credit card from the website. And it was like $7+, can’t exactly remember. And I think if you took another class with a clicker you had to pay again or something. That pissed me off as a broke college kid.