A lecturer work life ...

Last week was an exam week. Everyone was very busy; students were tense, lecturers were assigned for invigilating and administration staffs has to make all kind of arrangement to make sure the exam is smooth.

This week, after the exam, the students were relief and go for holidays. However, the works continue for the lecturers. It is the marking seasons. This is part of the norm and the standard cycle of a lecturer's job.

Many may think that a lecturer just have to teach in the class, conduct tutorials and that's it! Actually, it is more than that. Just a brief introduction of a lecturer KRA:

1) before the semester starts, a lecturer has to prepare the syllabus for the approval by the head of school. In the syllabus, the lecturer has to plan for the topics to be taught in the entire semester based on the learning outcomes. These learning outcomes has to match with the subject objectives, which are mapped with the Programme Objectives. Sounds complicate?

The lecturer also need to determine the assessments for the subject, such as designing the coursework, quizzes, projects, tests etc for the subjects. Again, these assessments has to satisfy the learning outcomes too.

2) Then, the lecturer will have to prepare the teaching slides for all the topics. To make the class interesting, the slides got to be attractive, with multimedia being integrated. It also has to be comprehensive to covers the topic area well.

3) Lecturer will need to prepare tutorial questions for the students to attempt from week to week. This is to ensure the students are able to cope with the subjects. Any deviation of focus and problems of achieving the learning outcomes can be detected earlier, so that the lecturer can close the gap before it is too late (student failing the subject).

4) While conducting the classes every week, lecturer has to monitor the progress of the students, monitor the attendance, and nowadays, many private institution also ask the lecturer to monitor the outstanding tuition fees payment by the students.

5) before the semester ends, lecturers will need to support the institutional wide marketing activities for recruiting new students. They will have to help on the counseling and explain the courses to the potential candidates and their parents.

6) during exam, lecturers will have to invigilating for exam. After exam, they will have to mark the exam papers and provide reports on the results.

7) from time to time, lecturers will be required to involves in research projects, attend seminar, conferences, trainings and others. Not to mention, the continuous counseling to the existing students who face problems with their studies.

The above may sounds like just another job in other industry, but the contribution of these tasks can be more than just a job that helps an institution to operate. It is a job that will affects the society in the future, because this job is about education.

However, how many of the lecturers now see it as a meaningful job? Many may just think that it is just another job that they can earn for a living, a glamour job with the title of a lecturer, and even a chance to talk while other has to listen, listen and listen!

Here, I would like to reinforce that, a lecturer job is not just to complete the above mentioned tasks for a subject but to cultivate critical thinking and develop the inquiry/learning skills of a students so that they can be a knowledgeable person who can contribute to the society. One hand can't clap, so it every parties need to work together for the real learning to take place. We cannot expect the students to know everything if the lecturer do not prepare and do the job well, and vice versa.

Recently, I over heard someone, who is a lecturer carrying the title of Dr, keep cursing the student 'idiot" while marking the exam answer scripts. I can understand the stress of work with tight deadlines, but why to the extend of cursing the students? As a lecturer to the students, this lecturer should be blame for unable to teach the students the properly, until the extend that this student can't meet the requirement of the subject. Also, there could be many other reasons to the poor answer given, but a student is not an idiot. They are learners!

Feel sad of what happened. I hope this only happens to this person and not other lecturers out there....