CollegeClassroom.net – Excellent Resource for Adjunct Instructors

Hello fellow Adjuncts! Last week I was alerted to an excellent resource for adjunct instructors – CollegeClassroom.net. This website is a completely free file-sharing platform for college teaching materials. What you can find here are full sets of teaching materials (syllabi, assignments, lecture content, visual aids, etc.) uploaded by adjuncts just like yourself (as well as lecturers, assistant professors, graduate students, etc.) for the purpose of sharing those materials with other teachers in the discipline. After sharing your own set of content, you will have full access to their searchable database of class materials that will help you get a jump start on teaching your next class.

According to CollegeClassroom.net,

Research, teaching, and service compete for the time of most higher education professionals. While teaching is one of the most rewarding aspects of the profession, class preparation often consumes a disproportionate amount of time.  We provide a solution to this time allocation challenge: A free file-sharing platform for teaching materials. The opportunity to access hundreds of peer-reviewed higher education teaching materials allows educators to substantially reduce class preparation time, while continuing to provide highest-quality instruction to their students.

Before a set of teaching materials is made available on this site, the materials are reviewed by peer educators who teach in the same or similar field. Thus, all materials available on CollegeClassroom.net are peer-reviewed, implying usefulness, utility, and effectiveness in the classroom. Users gain access to the site once the materials they’ve submitted have been approved.

Why the requirement to upload one’s own materials before having access to others? There are several reasons:

1. To keep the website rich with reliable content, to grow its usefulness for the adjunct community, and to provide material for adjuncts in more and more disciplines.
2. To prevent, what the authors of the site refer to as, “free riding.”
3. To keep in the spirit of community and sharing in higher education.

The authors of the site are careful to keep their website and the materials within it free from copyright infringement. Users of the site are encouraged to copyright or license their materials in a way they so choose (with the default setting being the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License). Users are also asked to make sure they fully own any content they are uploading. This would be particularly important for online adjuncts, as much of the content we use in teaching those courses is provided by the school we teach for and are therefore not ours to share.

Right now, seven disciplines are represented and we at AdjunctWorld would like to help this site grow to include more disciplines. In addition to the course materials, CollegeClassroom.net also provides resources for college adjunct instructors in the form of monthly newsletters, a resources page (with news, events, advice & support, job and career information, research & stats, and links to academic social media), and an active presence on social media.

To learn more about CollegeClassroom.net, subscribe to their free newsletter by clicking here. Their social media links are located on this page as well.

Hope you find this resource as helpful as we do! I myself find creating classes to be time consuming, yet incredibly fun. Usually, once I have a frame of reference to riff from, I stop “working” and start “creating”. It is in this spirit that I find a site like this so useful.

What do you all think of the course creation process? Chore? Or Art? What helps you in this process? Where and how do you begin? Please feel free to comment below!