• Many students suffer through lateness, moodiness and deliberate failing by lecturers
Image: SHARON MOAMBO
She logged onto the online platform for her first virtual class one hour past time. She had a reputation of taking attendance strictly, so the students all joined on time. Which meant they had been waiting for her for over an hour.
When she logged on, her first order of business was to read the Riot Act. She also had a reputation of high-handedness so that didn’t come as a surprise.
Her lectures were characterised by her infuriating lateness, moodiness, talking back at students and making extremely mean comments. One time, someone asked her to try and start the classes on time. Tardiness in online classes is worse than in physical classes, because you just sit at your device waiting for the lesson to begin. She’d respond by saying the classes were three hours long and she could join the class at any time within the three hours. Whenever she missed classes, or failed to cover enough due to her lateness, she’d fix make-up classes whenever she pleased. If anyone dared to make any objection, her response was simple: do not attend the class if you do not want to.
The day there was a Continuous Assessment Test was when we saw her craziness at its peak. The CAT was online. She was to send the link to two classes, which had around 300 students in total. She made a mistake and sent it to only 200. When the rest tried reaching out to her, she declined their calls, stating that if they missed the link, it was probably because they had not been attending classes. So, there they were, left in a limbo, not sure who to seek help from.
Two hours into the CAT, she realised she had indeed made a mistake. She now sent the link for the test to the rest of the student. Two hours later! By this time the students were disoriented and certainly not in the best state of mind to sit for a test. But the other option was to do the CAT with the next class, so, they were better off doing it then. If that wasn’t enough, she refused to add them extra time to cater for the two hours they lost due to her haughtiness.
Such lecturers are not uncommon. They are full of hubris and think that they know it all. They are irreproachable and seem determined to make students’ lives miserable. Unfortunately, most institutions of higher education, especially public ones, lack the mechanisms where students can make complaints about such lecturers to ensure action is taken against them. Often, there is also the fear among students that reporting such poor conduct may lead to dire consequences where the lecturer decides to deliberately make the class fail their exam as a way of hitting back at them.
Learning institutions should put in place mechanisms to deal with such unbecoming conduct. One important strategy could be providing a platform to report such incidents, while ensuring whistleblowers are not disadvantaged in any way for speaking out. There could also be non-students who randomly attend lectures to assess how the course instructor is doing the job.
Prevention will always be better than cure. Human resource departments in campuses should consider one’s interpersonal skills when hiring lecturers as opposed to just checking academic qualifications. Not everyone who is good at academics makes a good teacher.