We should support instructors based on how much value they deliver, not number of classes

DMS General
#1

We should reward teachers for furthering our mission. The extent to which they further our mission is measured more accurately by number of student hours taught than number of classes taught with at least three participants. The true metric is how much value was provided to the student by the teacher, assuming the subject matter of the class fits our mission. The best judge of that is the student.

We should have a two phase approach. Phase one measures student hours, phase two measures value delivered using a survey.

Phase 1:
An instructor will receive $5 per student hour taught, up to $150 per month.

Here’s a simple chart so you can see what effect this would have:

number of students in attendance | number of hours in a class = $ payed to instructor for one class
5 | 1= 25
5 | 2 = 50
5 | 4 = 100
10 | 1 = 50
10 | 2 = 100
10 | 4 = 150 (200 without the limit)

Phase 2:
An instructor will receive up to $150 per month. The amount they receive per class is outlined below.

A survey will be optionally filled out by students after each class:
1: I learned less than I expected.
5: I learned about as much as I expected.
7: I learned more than I expected. The class was excellent.

If and only if the rating is 5 or more, the teacher gets that many dollars per hour for that student. A rating less than 5 actually hurts our mission. It damages our reputation, and will hurt our chances of delivering value to that student. It might be helpful to penalize a teacher in those cases, maybe by subtracting money from their pay for that class. I wonder what people think about the penalty idea.

Each survey response will be associated with an email address. Only the surveys filled out by students marked as attended would count. If the student isn’t willing to do the survey, then you haven’t provided enough value.

The purpose of posting this on Talk is to discover any issues or improvements. I’ll be creating a board agenda item that reflects my idea of what the best move for the space is.

@Julie-Harris @Scott_Blevins @Edenblue @brsims @mrjimmy @Lampy

#2

I can only speak for myself, but I bet a few other instructors would agree. I’m not willing to jump through such hoops for $150 month. Or even $50 per class with no monthly limit. We’ll know when the reward to instructors is sufficient when there are enough classes to fill the demand.

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#3

What hoops?

#4

“$150 is not enough” is a valid concern. “I don’t want to provide a link to a survey” is not.

Phase 1 requires no extra effort. Just marking attendance.

Phase 2 requires giving students a link to a survey and asking them to fill it out. Keep in mind that the survey is 1 question long.

#5

Payments based on surveys and a point system. The Plasma Cutter class takes an hour and a and 4 students is max for me in a that class. If I understand your math, that’s $30. And to say that if a student doesn’t fill out a survey, I haven’t provided enough value is absurd. We have too few classes now and I believe your plan will further discourage teaching.

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#6

Payments based on a students’ opinions of how much they learned as determined by them answering a single question is not a hoop to jump through. It might be an invalid way of measuring the value provided to a student. But it’s not a hoop for instructors to jump through.

I’m going to break up the two proposals up into two items, one for each phase, that way people can vote for one and not the other if they feel one is effective and the other is not.

I’m assuming you meant to say an hour and a half.

What I’m hearing is that an improvement would be to raise the student hour rate from 5 to maybe 7.50. And maybe raise the upper limit on payout from $150 to $300.

What would you have these two numbers be? Do you dislike the whole idea of paying instructors based on how much value they deliver? Do you think the survey question is worded poorly? Do you think students are not good judges of how much they’ve learned?

In the case of 7.50 per student hour and a $300 limit, the chart would look like this:
number of students in attendance | number of hours in a class = $ payed to instructor for one class
5 | 1 = 37.50
5 | 2 = 75
5 | 4 = 150
10 | 1 = 75
10 | 2 = 150
10 | 4 = 300

#7

@bpamplin I wonder how you would adjust this to make it better? What are your thoughts?

#8

I’m not familiar with the distribution of number of classes taught by each member. And it’s important data for this discussion. @mrjimmy I vaguely remember you saying you had access to that data at the last board meeting. Can you share it? Or how do I access it?

#9

The number of classes is not the problem. It’s the amount of value being provided to the community. Increasing the number of classes is not part of the mission. Increasing the amount of value provided to makers is part of the mission.

#10

I think we should support instructors to charge a fee for their classes, let them determine their own value!

Required classes should be the only ones that are eligible for honorarium in order to keep prices low (or free) for members. These classes need to be taught to keep people coming back!

Project classes should be fee based (no honorarium) - this would encourage instructors to get the word out about their classes.

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#11

The number of classes is the problem.

Edit: We don’t have enough of many types.

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#12

I didn’t say I didn’t want to provide a link to a survey. Granular tweaking of how much one gets paid based on surveys is not valid. Yet another proposal to fine tune how an instructor is paid won’t fix. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money. Teaching an hour and a half class for $50 is not a windfall.
A better approach is to encourage and get a push from the board to endorse instructors using Eventbrite to find classes so that DMS doesn’t pay a thing. It’s been stated it’s an option, but if the time were spent the encouraging Eventbrite approach, I believe we’d have a better result.

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#13

What if instructors charged whatever they wanted? The one exception to this to prevent abuse should be mandatory safety classes. Why say this or have this opinion? I don’t think there’s a top down honorarium scheme that could please everyone and also be sustainable.

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#14

Telling instructors to charge a fee for their classes is not supporting them.

I think instructors should be able to charge a fee in addition to getting honorarium.

All classes need to be taught to keep people coming back.

#15

So you think that taking honorarium away completely and telling instructors to use Eventbrite will further the mission?

$50 a class is not enough but $0 + “use Eventbrite” is a better solution? That’s absurd.

#16

fry

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#17

@raffi, I’m curious… have you ever taught professionally where surveys are part of the job? If you have, what was your experience?

My experience is that some people give all 5’s because they’re earned, other people give all 3’s because they don’t want to be there, some people won’t give a 5 no matter what. And so on.

And then there’s this:

Some people are in a rush to get home, and that takes priority over instructor feedback. Others don’t want to fill out a survey because they don’t do surveys.

In other words, I believe your assumptions are flawed.

I agree that we should have surveys. The surveys show us our strengths and areas for improvement.

This proposal is going to cause accounting headaches and delay payments.

It will also reduce the number of classes.

The complaints I hear around here are NOT that the instructors or classes are bad, but rather that there aren’t enough of either.

This proposal is going to cause more strain on the teachers,

I encourage you to rethink this.

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#18

I think surveys are needed, to assist both the Space and the instructors in understanding what is effective in instruction. I’ve taken some excellent classes here. Also some that were not so much.

If the survey is only one question, to me that question would be, “Do I have a sufficient understanding of this equipment/process to come back and use it on my own?”

But while I applaud the idea of feedback for instructors and info for honorarium auditors, I believe that linking this to instructor compensation is premature. Noodle out an effective survey first, without linking it to anything. The information is valuable in its own right.

But linking it to honorarium will for sure cause all the distortions that are listed above by Holliday. Those tendencies exist anyway, but the social cost of affecting instructors’ compensation will exacerbate the behavior, and will destroy the value of the survey as feedback for instructors.

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#19

Maybe it’s possible to do both. Encourage and further define Eventbrite classes, and also use a DMS paid class structure. It’s less your specific model I object to, than a recurring undervaluing an instructor’s time.

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#20

I applaud that you are looking for solutions to our honorarium problem, but I am concerned that there are some specific holes in your suggestion.

First, what you propose would be a huge amount of volunteer effort to measure/administer.

More significantly, it also overlooks the nature of the class; encouraging more huge lecture hall classes and fewer hands-on classes because of the payment scheme. I can lecture 30 people for an hour or I can teach four hands-on. The lecture would pay much more, but for many of our skills I would question the amount of learning imparted/retained.

I suggest you look at Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive learning (or better yet, Anderson & Krathwohl’s widely-accepted revision).

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IMO, we aren’t enabling makers unless we reach the top levels of the taxonomy. But that’s instructor-intensive (relative the lower levels), and the proposed payment scheme would discourage that.

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