An idea

Having read through the minutes of the meeting and both carls and haddocks ideas, I have come to some thoughts =)

First..
If I seem to understand the meeting well enough , and please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that thw hole point of the proposal is 3 fold.
1. to curb the real life headaches that LL faces having to go through varifiying and paying instructors for umpteen million classes every week.
2.To empower the player to select where and how he/she spends or chooses thier time in sl education
3. To continue to maintain high standards in sl education

I will adress each of these

1. this is probably the most important one < at least to mind> and looking at some of the requests / ideas in the meeting easiest to fix. To my knowledge there are something like four main schools UoM, Teazers, ASL, and NCI that offer regular classes. Of course there are independents as well but lets wait a minute on that. The simple solution for LL is to acredit the instructors as I believe they do now, but also acredit the schools. The schools at that poiint can deseginate 1 or 2 people to deal with the fiancing through LL. i.e.

UoM : good morning LL
LL good morning
UoM : I am emailing you the chat histories for 36 classes this week . Instructors were amore zany iskiiar. These classes met the requirements for ll reinbursement . please deposit 36*500 ll in my account so that they can be paid
LL: very good give us 24 hours for potential auditing and the amount will be transfered


Linden now deals with one message instead of 36, they have chat logs for auditing course content should they wish, and the school is paid one lump sum which then in turn pays the instructors.

Now some might scream what about the independents. well LL has already accredited them as instructors so perhaps each of the schools could come up with a system where they could be Guest instructors or such.

2. impowering players
This is by far the easiest one.. they are already the most powerful thing in sl. starting when they log in. What they choose to do is what determines what content survives period. not just in education but in every aspect of sl. Just ask the club owners that went under when dwell went away.

3. Maintaining the quality
This really is an important issue. Short of school accredidation < UoM requires a minum degree to teach there> and linden audits I can't see what else can be done save word of mouth. Hey this class sucks and such don't take it. things like that

Yes I am sure there are loop holes in the ideas I just floated out to you all, but I don't see how this could be turned into a popularity contest, and definately vouchers is the wrong direction. I am afraid rather then further empowering players it would make the schools disappear as more and more instructors say.. ya know what this is too much work any more


And that my friends is probably the worst thing that can happen to both our Community and to SL as a whole

Orin Bethune
Instructor < pending>
UoM Scripting Graduate and instructor < pending>

I would be very uncomfortable with any SL educational system that forced independent instructors to affiliate with one of a list of Linden-approved schools. The various teaching institutions in SL should not become quasi-official arms of Linden Labs. There are lots of very good instructors quietly teaching on their own lands, and doing their own thing. SL would be poorer if LL did anything to interfere with that.

I definitely agree with that.

In regards to Orin's post:

1. This idea can still take up effort that could be better spent on other things. The "voucher system", and similar ideas, mean that payments would be more immediate, and Lindens less stressed and bogged down. Our stress, as Instructors, *should* ideally be unchanged... in fact, without having to send in reports to Lindens, we would be relieved of a lot of stress.

2. yeah, that already happens

3. With Lindens no longer having to deal with massive quantities of emails demanding payment... there'd theoretically be more time which could be used for better Instructor screening. Thus I would propose an application process (beyond "Click Here to Apply!". After scanning through a person's application, a Linden could contact the person via either email or IM, bounce a few quick questions around, and either approve or deny the application. With massive growth... it can still be a lot to handle, but, as far as I can tell, it would be MUCH less time-consuming...

I'd MUCH rather teach a class on my own land, for many reasons. I don't want to affiliate with some commercial enterprise.

Unfortunately, with chat logs needing to be audited, we'd have much the same problem as we have now. There aren't enough Lindens to check up on all the chat logs, so either they'd have to hire many more staffers -- this is probably not feasible -- or they wouldn't audit the classes at all, which would mean a disaster in terms of quality and abuse control.

On the other side, it'd be quite an administrative feat to have to collect all the chat logs for every teacher for every class every day. And we'd run into problems if someone forgot a chat log somewhere.




I think your ideas for school or teacher accreditation would help for maintaining quality. And definitely, we need Lindens to audit more classes to see what's going on out there. Feedback from these audits would be nice too, so teachers could hear what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, or how they could improve. Constructive feedback, or even awareness of the audits, could encourage higher quality classes as well.

But then, how do we make that scalable?


Sel

As with some others, I would not want to force the independants to have to affiliate with any university (wether or not they teach on their own land or the universities).

There are some problems saving chat logs. If the instructor crashes all logs are lost
Using a scripted object to record the chat *could* work but there definate memory limitations to this and it would be a massive project to get something that would be able to record (and send possibly via e-mail) the ammount of text in an entire class. It would be easier if the Lindens spot checked by popping around to the classes here and there.

I am a RL teacher. So, I like to think, I know something about teaching. I teach one class in SL, using Photoshop or another graphics program to make clothing. As far as I know, I am the only person currently teaching this course in-world on a regular basis. I have tried to make it a valuable experience for my students and have put a lot of time, effort and upload charges into developing the course.

I teach it once a month. I alternate the timing between US and European evenings. My US class averages 15-20 people and the European 5-10. I provide a critique notecard with the material handouts and get about 10% returned. Of these all have been good. I have never had anyone tell me the class sucked, so, I assume most people felt they had gotten something out of it.

I had an invitation to join Teezers as an instructor but didn’t act on it. Not because I thought ill of Teezers; only, because my RL doesn’t allow me to stick to a formal schedule. I think I am like a lot of independents. I teach because I love to teach and because I want to make a positive difference.

I wasn’t able to attend the meeting the other night. However, I must say I feel anxious and concerned with what I read. I know Linden Labs is very busy and possibly overwhelmed. Last month when I sent in my request for payment, I used the same format I had been using since January. It was what I was told to use.

I received a curt reply from Lucy telling me I needed to use the correct format to get paid. Upon looking at the format she sent me, the only difference from the one I had been using was the arrangement of the details. (I was paid at the same time.) I was a bit taken back at the time but soon forgot about it. After reading the meeting notes, I feel like I now understand what happened. Her curtness was due to being overworked.

My concern is that Linden Labs will put efficiency before effectiveness. Individual instructors like me will become casualties to the greater good (read that as efficiency for LL). SL will lose its diversity and large numbers before quality schools will become the norm.

I am also concerned about Linden labs follow through. I am also a Greeter. Six months or so ago, we received the first of the new Greeter HUDs. They were to make greeting much easier for both the greeters and new people. It never worked correctly. We received three updates then nothing. I have received exactly one greeter request in six months of wearing the device 90% of the time I have been online. Before that I received three or four a day. To my knowledge, not one greeter claims the device works for them. Greeting, for all practical purposes has stopped, unless you bump into the new player at Help Island or the Welcome Centers and offer to help.

This lack of follow through concerns me with the new instructor program. I know several of the Linden’s. Jeska is a hard worker and tries very hard to help the volunteers. The other Lindens I am familiar with are the same. However, their priorities must be set by someone above them. If they are told to move one, they move on. Even if the job is half finished.

If this happens to the instructor system of Second Life, we will all be worst off than before. They may be more efficient and earn a bit more profit. However, I fear the quality of life within SL may be the loser. And, I guess in the long run, so will Linden labs.

Jen

I have only recently - very recently - been made an instructor, and I have yet to actually teach much of anything in SL, so my point of view is pretty much limited to being a student. And, as a student, I would never have taken about half the classes I've taken if I had to "pay" for them. It's not that I'm cheap, or that the classes weren't worthwhile - they all were in their own ways - it's just that if I had to decide on whether to keep my precious vouchers for something like a scripting class over something fun, there's little question, scripting would win out.

Which means that a lot of the fun classes would probably be dropped or would have to be offered voucher free to draw many students. I understand that a lot of these classes would still be offered, and that's great, but I would think that the diversity and frequency of such classes would suffer. As a result, a resident who has little interest in building - until they realize that they can build, say, a set of flexable antennae - might never build anything, and might never realize that building stuff is fun.

In other words, I don't think that decision to take a class should be made by people with an incentive NOT to take them (to preserve their voucher or save their L$). In my case, the decision to take the fun classes has been pretty much spur of the moment, a "heck-I've-got-an-hour-to-kill-so-why-not" type of thing.

Still I realize that LL needs to reduce it's administrative burden, and at the same time control the flow of $L into the economy through instructors. To me, Orin's idea is a pretty darn good one. Some of the quality control and administrative duties are shifted to the various schools, and LL need only perform occasional audits to ensure the schools are doing a good job.

As for independants, they could continue on more or less as they have all along, maybe change the rules that they have to submit class reports in, say, bundles of five at a time. Depending on how many independants there are, it might not be too onerous a burden on LL (then again it might not solve anything).

Anyway, that's my 6.6 $L on the subject.