I've been checking the job listings for ALs every day for months and there has been next to nothing posted in all that time - currently there's a level 2 computing course listed, which I am in no way able to teach and that's all I've seen this academic year.
Rightly or wrongly (or perhaps naively) I'm not hearing things that make me overly concerned about my job here at the OU - we've had various voluntary redundancy processes across the university but some of that is necessary because in the pandemic a bunch of people said "I've always wanted to study with the OU" and signed up, now those students are beginning to graduate and we don't need as many staff members as we once did (there was a huge hiring frenzy in the pandemic - which is why I'm even here in the first place). We had the biggest cohort we've ever had for SM123 this year, I don't think they'll want to make me redundant in a hurry, although if I offered to jump they might let me, and then not replace my position...
My contract says they can pay me my current wage as long as I have tutor-groups of between 15 and 25. What normally happens is that we have tutor groups of around 20, but if they wanted to have fewer ALs teaching bigger groups they could. In fact a back of the envelope calculation suggests that even if they lost 8 tutor groups from SM123 they could still not hire replacement tutors and just have the rest of us take up the slack. That'll be why there are no vacancies being advertised. I'm still checking the job board, but I'm not pining my hopes on taking any other modules here at the OU.
Before I came here I was freelance editing and tutoring secondary school pupils. I cannot return to editing on health grounds. My husband is keen for me to return to tutoring so I'll see what's happening in the autumn and relaunch that in September time.
Oh and I've signed up to the AL skills register for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) programme in STEM to be considered as a potential (paid) research assistant on suitable projects. My mixed-methods research project may have had everything that could go wrong, go wrong (the eagle-eyed will have noticed that I've hidden all previous posts alluding to it, things have been so painful I'm honestly worried I might have accidentally self-plagiarised so to save myself the stress only I can see them for the moment), but I learnt valuable skills about conducting qualitative research that people get paid for using. Of course, I'm putting myself up against actual social scientists (many of whom are also scrubbing around trying to find extra income) so I shan't hold my breath, but it's one more thing to try and I'm currently in a throw mud, see what sticks state of mind.
Thinking about next year
I've been checking the job listings for ALs every day for months and there has been next to nothing posted in all that time - currently there's a level 2 computing course listed, which I am in no way able to teach and that's all I've seen this academic year.
Rightly or wrongly (or perhaps naively) I'm not hearing things that make me overly concerned about my job here at the OU - we've had various voluntary redundancy processes across the university but some of that is necessary because in the pandemic a bunch of people said "I've always wanted to study with the OU" and signed up, now those students are beginning to graduate and we don't need as many staff members as we once did (there was a huge hiring frenzy in the pandemic - which is why I'm even here in the first place). We had the biggest cohort we've ever had for SM123 this year, I don't think they'll want to make me redundant in a hurry, although if I offered to jump they might let me, and then not replace my position...
My contract says they can pay me my current wage as long as I have tutor-groups of between 15 and 25. What normally happens is that we have tutor groups of around 20, but if they wanted to have fewer ALs teaching bigger groups they could. In fact a back of the envelope calculation suggests that even if they lost 8 tutor groups from SM123 they could still not hire replacement tutors and just have the rest of us take up the slack. That'll be why there are no vacancies being advertised. I'm still checking the job board, but I'm not pining my hopes on taking any other modules here at the OU.
Before I came here I was freelance editing and tutoring secondary school pupils. I cannot return to editing on health grounds. My husband is keen for me to return to tutoring so I'll see what's happening in the autumn and relaunch that in September time.
Oh and I've signed up to the AL skills register for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) programme in STEM to be considered as a potential (paid) research assistant on suitable projects. My mixed-methods research project may have had everything that could go wrong, go wrong (the eagle-eyed will have noticed that I've hidden all previous posts alluding to it, things have been so painful I'm honestly worried I might have accidentally self-plagiarised so to save myself the stress only I can see them for the moment), but I learnt valuable skills about conducting qualitative research that people get paid for using. Of course, I'm putting myself up against actual social scientists (many of whom are also scrubbing around trying to find extra income) so I shan't hold my breath, but it's one more thing to try and I'm currently in a throw mud, see what sticks state of mind.