Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, May 07, 2019

Onboarding Offputting

With each passing year the process of "onboarding" to teach my summer intensive at Berkeley has required more and more and more steps, taken more and more and more of my time, has become more complicated, more opaque, more belligerent. During this time the process has been "automated" (which just means already overstressed overburdened underpaid adjuncts doing more and more stuff we used to get support for) while also an explosion of officers and counselors and support staff have been hired none of whom can be reached, none of whom can do anything to help but smile blandly while you fume. The hostility to teachers in teaching settings by corporatized-administrators is almost as surreal as the general proposition that enslaving a generation to student loan debt then throwing them into insecure unbenefited low-paying work is giving them "tools for a bright future" in the first place -- something I was sold myself and then sold to a generation of promising, righteous, brilliant, beautiful students. Higher education is becoming (to the extent that it wasn't always already) a vast slaughterhouse in which I am being chewed up into hamburger meat while collaborating in the chewing up of my students into hamburger meat. I sincerely cannot recommend this way of life to anybody anymore.

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

This onboarding, is this a baby-steps online tutorial on how to use whatever learning management system has been sold to your institution? My wife just went through something like that, by the time she had jumped through all the hoops, the course she wanted to take was full.