Months and months ago I foolishly agreed to give a few lectures in New Media Theory for the MA in Screenwriting. Since then my busy-ness levels have soared, I’ve realised I’d misunderstood the rates and I’m getting paid a pittance for the job (payment for casual teaching is terrible! I would probably get more per hour sitting behind the cash register at the supermarket!), and I’ve been told that my five lectures constitute an entire 10 ECTS course for these students and they’d like me to provide material so that the eight distance students can follow the course as well, please. Well, they upped the hourly rate an inkling after that, though it’s still miserable, and so I’ve decided to just do the teaching with minimal preparation. Which feels kind of evil, but ya know, I’ve only spent three hours on this so far and I’ve already got a course blog set up with a nice CSSed version of their main tablecentric design and I’ve worked out more or less what we’ll do each class. And it was fun last time I taught there.

I’m going to try just having one course blog, giving all the students accounts and requiring they all post at least three posts by the end of the semester. Perhaps some’ll set up their own blogs but I’m not going to make that a main point of the course – their assessment task is simply to write a traditional essay and the course only runs for a few weeks. I’m hoping that a joint blog will be enough for the off-campus students to be involved.