To "become a teacher" with Corvid College, you need only draft a course proposal and post it with all the helpful information and links for students to enroll in it. It might be helpful to contact one of the listed teachers about your course, but there is no official approval process.
Your course should be important, and not trivial. Consider whether or not this is true of the course you have in mind. There are plenty of opportunities to learn things that are trite, including every kind of work. Make Corvid a place where the important is learned.
Having thought about it, when you have a description of the course ready, you'll then need to decide on time and place, fees, cost mitigation, books, etc. Many of us have chosen to do this in collaboration with students at the beginning of term Course Planning Hoedowns. Others do so via email. Still others make all those decisions and hope that students sign on.
How?
First, on the page of the term during which you want to teach your course, create a link to the course page by putting its title in triple square brackets. It is best to keep your course title as short as you can. Long titles often do not fit well in browsers. Also colons should not be used in the title, since this understood differently by the wikisite and your full title will not appear. Use periods or commas in place of a colon in your title. If you have a long title, put just the most significant few words in brackets and the rest outside them.
After saving the page with your added link, click on the link and create a new page. Add your course description and details on that page, in the editing box.
Here is a suggested format for the course page:
{Magnetic course description—something that will bring students to it. Perhaps include a general outline of topics, activities, or methods.}
Schedule: {day(s) of the week}, {time}
Location: {name of site and link}, {Room at site}
Fees: {$$$ per meeting or per term}
Teacher: {link to your autobio page}
{link to enrollment page}
{link to more detailed schedule, perhaps updated weekly, for drop-in students}
{Texts - here in some of my courses I have identified free online books or other perhaps unknown sources of the relevant books}
For examples, go to any course page, and look at the code in the edit box. You can always pirate someone's course page entirely from the editing box and change the content while leaving the formatting. That's one of the wonders of the wiki.
Attend a new teacher orientation,
as announced around the end of the previous term. For Sunreturn Term 2012, it's Thursday, January 5. Contact Eric at ebuck (at) CorvidCollege (dot) org.
Attend an opening-of-term Hoedown,
our living course catalog, to stump for your course. For Sunreturn Term 2012, it's Sunday, January 15.
Watching for enrollments in your classes
Once you have a course description on the site, students can begin enrolling in it. They do so on a common course enrollment page. You should go to that page and at the bottom you will see this line in small red print "Start watching: site corvidcollege.wikidot.com | category _default | this page". Click on "this page" and you will receive email notification of any enrollment (click on "site corvidcollege.wikidot.com" to receive notification of all changes made to any page). You have to visit the page to see if it is in your class, but that's not inconvenient. When someone enrolls in your course, contact them as indicated on the enrollment page and provide any information they need. Teachers are the students' only link to the college.
You, the teacher
Once you have the course description posted you should also go to the autobiographies page and post first a link to your name, and on your autobio page, a teaching-and-learning description of yourself. This tells potential students what areas you work in, are interested in, and would assist in independent studies in. Also leave some contact info there (if email, replace the @ sign with (at) to prevent mining of the site for email addresses.
What sort of qualities should you have?
That cannot be determined in detail ahead of time, but we do know that initiative, inventiveness, and a preference for the more intense forms of education are what we have found useful. The capacity to practice teaching as an art in itself is critical. You should probably also agree with the descriptions of the philosophy of the college as it is found throughout this website, especially our having no use for bureaucrats or administrators, but we don't mind dissent.
