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Guidelines for Faculty and Instructors
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We're happy to have you on board, working to make Woodcrest a fun, but also educational place. As a professor or teaching assistant, you represent the university and are a pillar in the community, and thus should hold yourself to a higher standard.
As such, we provide for you requirements and guidelines below:
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REQUIREMENTS
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1. TEACH. We request that you provide some sort of instructional RP each semester. You may choose to have your class focus more on content, or focus more on RP. However, even in the latter case, we ask that real educational material stands at the core of your class.
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You may take a semester off, given that you communicate this with the academic coordinator. If you offer no instruction without communicating with the University Coordinator, you are subject to being removed from the Woodcrest Faculty.
- The standard is a weekly 1 hour class, scheduled on the sim calendar.
- If this is too difficult, we are open to negotiate a lighter teaching load each semester.
- If your intention is to RP a good amount of time on-sim outside of class, we may be satisfied with you fulfilling this requirement by having tutorials with individual students or small groups of students.
2. ANNOUNCE YOUR CLASSES AND CANCELLATIONS. When holding scheduled classes, we ask that you send a notice to the Woodcrest University group 30-60 minutes before your class takes place. PLEASE DO THIS ONLY ONCE. Notices in SL are quickly capped. Use the university group chat to do the rest of your announcements.
If you must cancel a class, we ask that you send a similar notice if possible, in addition to notifying a sim scheduler as soon as you know that you intend to canceled. If you miss two of your classes without providing notice, or without reasonable cause for not doing so, your class will be removed from the schedule, and your timeslot will be open to be taken by others.
3. CREATE A WOODCREST RP PROFILE IN YOUR SL PROFILE PICKS. As we're entrusting you with the ability to create notices in the university group, as well as to run RP sessions on sim, we request a level of commitment to us.
4. PLEASE TAKE CLASS ATTENDANCE. And send the list of attendees to the University Coordinator. Our honor roll system will not function without your cooperation to give students credit where due, so we thank you in advance in taking a tiny bit of extra effort to help! You may choose not to count a student with negligible presence or contribution, or one who was actively disruptive.
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At the end of each half-semester, you may RECOMMEND students for Honors or High Honors. This recommendation may be given for ANY reason: consistent attendance, helpful contributions in class discussion, doing extra credit work, performing well in class quizzes, ((OOC: or fetching your tea or other favors... the school won't inquire unless it's blatant)). For particularly misbehaved students, you may also report a demerit for the half-semester.
CLASSROOM GUIDELINES
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1. ENHANCING ON-SIM ACTIVITY AND RP EXPERIENCE is one of our primary goals for classes. Staying in-character as much as possible is encouraged even for RL content-rich classes. Off-sim field trips are discouraged, and should receive moderator permission first; a better field trip plan is something on-sim, including collaborating with a sim builder to prepare a skybox location.
2. During your scheduled class time, you effectively have the authority of an event coordinator or sim storyteller; only a sim moderator may over-rule you in the context of your class. The students should respect this OOC even if they don't respect it IC.
3. For RP disruptions in your class time (e.g. a student has a medical emergency or a fire breaks out in the school), you have the right to play along, or to invalidate the event OOC. Disruptions should gain your approval or collaboration.
4. Of course, we're all here to have fun, so do play along with your students, although generally don't allow your class to descend into chaos. Many students DO enjoy learning, and so maintaining discipline and keeping your class on point may be one of those ways to maximize the fun.
5. Do remember that Woodcrest is a university. You may request that a student remain to chat after class, or request they come to office hours, but high school methods of discipline such as detention, mandatory study halls, or writing lines (or heaven's, no, spanking), are generally not done here.
6. The classroom is not a place to promote or disparage a political platform or a faith tradition. We discourage topics related to contemporary political and religious issues (and even be cautious of historical and sociological treatments), unless you have advanced degrees in those areas and have experience in guiding thoughtful, respectful and sympathetic academic discussion of these topics.
7. We welcome and encourage you to RP on sim outside of class also. Of course, we ask our faculty to uphold high standards of conduct, so as not to bring disrepute upon themselves or the university.
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