CAMPUS
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, August 19, 1996
7C
Short classes fit into busy agendas
Melissa Hardesty
Lenexa senior
"If you get behind in a four-week class, there is no chance to get back."
By Mallorre DIII
Kansan staff writer
Students in James Gunn's summer science fiction class recline in easy chairs they moved in from the Nunemaker lobby. They take their shoes off, prop their feet on the table and discuss a whirlwind of 25 science fiction novels in two weeks.
Students in Allen Ford's fourweek tax accounting class lean forward in their desks, rub their foreheads, frown at the chalkboard and busily enter numbers into their calculators, checking answers to the dozens of problems they worked on the previous night.
Summer class formats are as varied as the subjects they cover. They range from 12 days to eight weeks, from traditional lecture formats to simulcasts between Lawrence and the Regents Center.
But summer classes are getting shorter. Of the Regents Center's 15 education classes, only one lasted eight weeks. The journalism and education schools offered three hours of credit in two weeks.
The reason, say school deans responsible for scheduling classes, is that students and faculty like it. But some worry about whether professors can cram 16 weeks of class into a few weeks in June or July.
Ford, professor of business, said he cuts very little from the curriculum to make the tax accounting course fit into four weeks. He compensates by shifting the burden to the students.
Melissa Hardesty, Lenexa senior, was in Ford's class. She said she felt the extra burden of the condensed curriculum. She said she had to work every night in order to stay caught up. She thought the class's intensity would help her with the comprehensive final, but she said she still prefers eight-week summer classes.
"If you get behind in a fourweek class, there's no chance to get back," she said.
Ford, professor in the school of business, has taught his tax accounting class in both 16-week and four-week formats.
"There is a concern about retention," he said. "That was my initial concern. The little bit of feedback I've had seems to suggest that the retention is certainly as good or better than what they do here in the fall semester."
James Gunn, professor emeritus of English, has offered short summer science fiction courses for more than 20 years. Gunn's experience with intensive language courses in the U.S. Army in World War II impressed him enough to try the format. He condensed the class into two
weeks, added Saturday and Sunday classes and offered it in the summer. That allowed students from across the country and renowned science fiction authors from around the world to meet in Lawrence and participate in the class.
Gunn required students to have read 25 novels before class began and gave them four weeks after it ended to complete a paper on which their grade is based. Despite the class's casual atmosphere, students feel the squeeze of the compressed class.
"It's an absolute breakneck speed." said Bill Pitsenberger, an attorney from Topeka who took the class during his vacation.
Aaron Rosenberg, a Lawrence doctoral student who took Gunn's class, said he thought it would have worked better if it were longer. But he added that there were advantages to completing the class in two weeks.
"When you leave here you have 25 classic plots and ideas and characters and structures wandering through your head and bumping into each other and forming all these different
combinations." Rosenberg said. "It's a great environment for coming up with your own stories, for thinking about the field as a whole. Things may get a little jumbled individually, but you come out with a sense of the way everything fits together."
Rosenberg said he thought the class was successful in two weeks because it wasn't a basic skills class.
"The difference is, here, you go away and think about it," he said. In a basic skills class, he said, the student has to go away and know it.
A course's length is determined by the professors and the department chair or dean. As long as a three-credit-hour course fills 40 hours of classroom time, it's official. The shortened three-hour class could meet 10 hours a day for four days if a teacher was willing to teach it and students were willing to take it.
The 16-week semester goes back to the time when students needed summers off for harvest. As communities have evolved beyond their agrarian roots, so has education.
The School of Journalism is one of the few schools that offers two-week basic skills courses in the summer. Dana Leibengood, director of student services for the school, said that the classes originally were condensed so that incoming graduate students could nufill prerequisites before starting in the fall. Now that there are fewer graduate students enrolling, he said, he was in favor of going back to the eightweek format.
"You simply need more time," Leibengood said.
The department of engineering only offers eight-week classes in the summer. Tom Mulinazzi, associate dean of engineering, said summer classes go fast enough as it is, and that students would rather take classes in eight weeks. He said he didn't think professors would shorten engineering classes.
The department of psychology offered most of its lower-level classes in four weeks. Dennis Karpowitz, chairman of the
"I still prefer eight weeks," he said. "It gives a little more time for things to sink in."
department, said the needs of the professors dictate the scheduling of summer classes.
Karpowitz said that professors are paid one month's salary for summer courses, regardless of their length, and added that some professors just don't teach in the summer because it's not worth it.
Some classes are not only brief' — they're beamed to other campuses.
Fred Rodriguez, associate professor of education, taught a two-week class to students in Lawrence and at the Regents Center simultaneously via twoway television. Rodriguez said he thinks he'll be encouraged to do more and more television classes, all year round, in order to increase enrollment at the Regents Center.
"I think that's probably the direction a lot of courses are taking," he said.
Condensing classes is good business for the Regents Center. Competition for students in the Kansas City area has influenced KU departments to schedule more short classes.
Bruce Lindvall, assistant dean of the Regents Center, said, "On one hand we're trying to meet the needs of the students," Lindvall said. "On the other hand, we have to be sensitive to other institutions in the Kansas City area and how they offer courses."
Lindvall said more schools eventually may offer shorter classes to students.
"I think they will certainly look at what they're doing," he said. "Change is often slow in coming."