Posted by Robert Archer in New Course Supervisor position

SNIP

All of this stuff can be basically summed up as “the Commandant’s job.” Why can’t you do it, exactly?

I don’t really buy this argument of “we need to have someone permanent because of too much change over every term.” It could apply to the entire Academy. Except that’s silly to do, because the whole point of having the Academy be a cabinet position is that we can establish some form of accountability over whether or not people are present and actually doing it. When the club is broken that only happens once every eight months for the cabinet jobs, and never for the non-cabinet jobs.

EDIT: Just to expand on the above, the Academy has a Commandant and a Vice Commandant, and an AFLO if they appoint one, and courses were typically handled by the Commandant, or the Vice Commandant if someone delegated the work to them. The argument you yourself put forward is that we don’t need an AFLO anymore because the Academy overhead is less than it used to be. If there’s less work to do, then we don’t need more people to do it.

Unless your response is that the Commandant and the Vice Commandant have failed to manage courses. I would counter that by saying the President (read: You, at least some of the time) failed to keep the Academy accountable for doing that work and appointed people who were absent and had no interest in doing it. We shouldn’t be inventing more jobs so that people who have been doing nothing can continue to do nothing.

Joe

So maybe I am mistaken on what you are saying here Joe so forgive me if I am wrong here. But from your words I took your above comments about holding the various Academy positions responsible for updating and grading courses. To me to my understanding it has always been to those who grade the courses to do so. Then given over to the Commandant to get them uploaded say to TECH for the library.

The course tutors manage the individual Academy courses, including grading and content. The Commandant or Vice Commandant manage the tutors. I do not see why we need to invent an additional position between the Commandant and the tutors. It’s not like managing the tutors is an exceptionally difficult burden.

While I like the idea and, like Jerome, would have great interest in filling it, I am inclined to agree with Joe (at least to some extent). As far as I’m aware, the Academy Commandant doesn’t oversee a lot apart from cadet placement and reinstatement of GMs. Any other responsibilities are few and far between.

The Academy does not reinstate GMs. The Academy is supposed to serve as a resource to the membership on matters relating to ongoing training and development in STF. That would include this stuff about courses as well as running the training fleet.

However, despite that being a sound argument, I get the feeling it’s been said before, as I’ve heard things about the courses needing a major update for over a year now. Yes, it might technically be part of the Commandants job, but we can say that all day long and it won’t change the fact that the work’s not getting done for some reason or another. Maybe a new position is necessary, even just a temporary one designed for course revision. Alternatively, the Vice Commandant position could be eliminated/transformed into this new Academic Dean-esque role.

Gavin

The Commandant has a lot more responsibilities than what you claim Gavin. There’s more to running the Academy than just placing cadets and reinstating GMs (which we actually don’t do as far I know, that’s the GM department), I’d be happy to discuss them at length, but I don’t want this discussion to devolve into a discussion about what the Commandant does all day.

Sorry, “what the Commandant does all day” is actually very relevant to this discussion and why it seems like this is a wasteful proposal. You guys said, at the outset, that the Academy has less work to do now; you yourselves raised the question so you don’t get to run away from it because it turns out people want to talk about it.

I think, at least, in the interim, this position could assist in upgrading the course textbook. It’s a big task as I’d argue most of the courses need an overhaul (some minor, some major). I’m presently working on the CO course as I’d like to see it be graded more on the test taker’s ability to troubleshoot ship management problems rather than regurgitating facts from the course. That will take time because I am a volunteer and I don’t have unlimited time to devote to such a pursuit (I have to pay my bills just like anyone else after all). Also, making the course more “situationally based” may enable it to require less frequent updates, at least that’s my aim.

As a course tutor, I never have issues returning graded courses in roughly two weeks (if there was a delay, I always let the course taker and the Commandant know). Changing the course to make timely improvements takes a lot more energy.

I would argue that the question is whether or not the Commandant can realistically manage the demands of the course textbook (ie: getting those much needed upgrades done) with all the other responsibilities of the role at present? I’d argue, it could be too much, at least right now. Just a little food for thought.

See, I would strongly disagree here. The Commandant and the Vice Commandant have typically managed to keep the Academy running normally and tackle at least one major project per term of some significance that they’d want to do by focusing on it. If you guys are saying that you can’t do that, I think it says more about you two than the role itself.

If you guys are too busy to do the job properly then you shouldn’t be doing it. And yes, I understand that the alternative to you guys doing the job may be “nobody,” because nobody else wants to or can do it. That is a different problem, that deserves its own discussion. Until we have that discussion, I would argue we should not be bending the existing culture of the club to take low activity from department heads as a given. There is simply too much tolerance of that here already and it’s utterly corrosive to keeping the club going.

An addition, I suppose I see this as maybe more of an “evolution” of the AFLO role. The original intent of the AFLO was to assist the academy staff in monitoring the ships to ensure nobody was going horribly AWOL and that things were running smoothly (which typically involves a bit more than watching the master roster, I always would read the ships to where I had a pretty good idea of what the crew was presently doing in relation to the main simm, when I was Commandant for example). When we had four ships, it certainly was a heavy workload. Not so much anymore with just one ship.

-Kat
Vice Commandant, CO Course Tutor

I don’t actually disagree with this part of your proposal. Just the idea that we need to create new positions to do stuff you should be able to handle.

So getting to this point of the discussion, I have to agree with Kat, there are alot of behind the scene things that the various admin staff for the club do that is not always obvious or seen for one reason or another. Having held a few FComm roles which to me are similar to the Commandant just not quite as in depth, I can say supporting multiple ships much less one ship like in the Academy even there can be a time taker, added that the Commandant and their staff need to set the standard for the Academy experience to new cadets it can in my view be a handful.

Again we all need to be mindful that all of us who hold admin roles in the club only have so much time to do so. This goes up and down the chain of the club if you ask me, the fact we have less and less people term after term stepping up to learn and hold these roles means that there is a constant struggle to fill roles with qualified people because often now those who are qualified have held such spots so much they are burned out. Obviously this is a multi-pronged problem all over the club with many reasons it is happening. But let’s not get off track for the point of Dan’s discussion.

No, I think that’s actually at the very heart of this discussion. If we are struggling to fill roles with qualified people, that would imply we should have fewer roles instead of more roles. The overall amount of work there is to do has not changed, so the logical consequence of having fewer people volunteering to do things is that we must expect the people who volunteer to do more than they would before, rather than less. Dan and Kat seem to want to do less than the holders of those positions typically do when the Academy is functioning normally. Given that volunteer time is precious, that is a very demanding thing to ask us to support.

To sum up in my opinion overall I agree with Dan’s idea. For the pros of things having someone able to hold it long term after term setting a constant agreed standard and vision for the courses as outlined above makes sense to me and longer term helps ease a burden on future Presidents and Commandants etc. On the Con side I would say obviously there is the question of ‘who’ fills this role? And hence my query at first asking if the Cmdt/ACmdt cant in the short term do this work? So to follow that up what if we follow through on the idea and are unable to get anyone to fill this role to begin with? What do we do then? Added on this how do we handle when say the first person to fill this role steps down or maybe vanishes without a trace from the club 1+ terms down the line and again are unable to fill it? Again what then?

Those are my thoughts on this and questions Dan. I hope somewhat they have been helpful!

Robert Archer

“What do we do if the person vanishes without a trace 1+ terms down the line?” is the easiest question to answer. The Commandant will fire them and appoint a new one. A harder question to answer is if we will even have a club 1+ terms down the line, given that we all seem to be desperately trying to treat inactivity as normal.

Joe