A few weeks ago, a new service for faculty launched: FacultyFiles.com.
The service is designed to make work easier for faculty by making it very easy to store and reuse frequently used items, such as feedback for purposes of grading, common responses to discussion board questions, course materials, and the like. The service is directed primarily at those who teach (at least partly) online, though all faculty can benefit from this sort of service. FacultyFiles is well aware of faculty who may be part-time; it’s possible to set up courses for more than one school. In fact, a perusal of the job boards (at least the job boards available with the ten-day trial subscription) indicates that part-time faculty are the intended user base; all of the links are to adjunct job sites.
Once you’re signed up, getting set up is fairly easy. Just add a school, then add a course, and FacultyFiles.com will automatically populate the course with a number of topics/categories, as below (note that it’s possible to add others; click on any image to enlarge):
Clicking on any of the topics/categories allows you to set up a week-by-week plan:
Selecting any of the weeks brings up a window where you can plan to your heart’s content. Note also that it’s possible to store links and files, and that the materials stored with the service are all searchable.
It’s certainly a good thing to have one’s course materials ready to hand, both for finding things quickly and for being able to reuse materials when that’s appropriate. For that alone, however, the price tag is rather steep, especially given that there are other tools that can be used to store and back up materials (e.g., Google Documents, Dropbox, SpiderOak, etc.). FacultyFiles.com will set you back $24.99/month for month-to-month service, $21.99/month for a six-month subscription, or $19.99/month for a year’s subscription. That’s a minimum of $239.88 per year.
To be fair, FacultyFiles.com offers more than just storage of course materials. A subscription also gets users access to an online community, as well as to the job boards (all links to external sites). If members lack sufficient time to search job postings themselves, they can secure the services of a personal job search agent---but it will cost $59.
My initial sense is that the service is very pricey, especially for contingent faculty. Storage options are available for less (in some cases, even for free) elsewhere. The job boards point to external sites (though it’s admittedly handy to have a centralized list of job sites). Were I contingent faculty, I don’t think I’d see a subscription as a good investment.
That said, though the ten-day trial gives the user access to most things, it doesn’t provide access to everything, so it may be that I’ve missed something.
So let’s hear from you, readers. What’s your impression of FacultyFiles.com? Is it worth the subscription price? Please chime in--especially if you’re a subscriber.
The lead photo is a Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by katerha. All other images are screengrabs created by the author.