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Online adjunct faculty: issues & opportunities.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The growth and success of online courses would not be possible without the use of adjunct faculty. Adjunct faculty have always been widely used in higher education, especially in the community college setting. Nationally, adjuncts teach 30-50% of all credit courses, and compose about 60% of all faculty (Gappa & Leslie, 1993). Who are online adjuncts? How can we best support them and provide development to sustain quality programs? This paper will share insights from Florida Community College at Jacksonville.

Introduction

The greatest growth in online courses has occurred at community colleges. In 2001-2002, 960 public two-year institutions offered distance education courses and had enrollments of 1,472,000, compared to 550 public four-year institutions with 945,000 enrollments and 710 private four-year institutions with 589,000 enrollments (U.S. Department of Education, 2003).

Staffing online courses poses a great challenge. The student demand for online courses has outpaced the full time instructional capacity at many institutions, creating an instructional gap that adjuncts readily fill. Though this is a relatively new phenomenon, critics feel that the rise in the numbers of online adjuncts could threaten the instructional quality of distance education programs (Carnevale, 2004). I will not debate the merits and pitfalls of this practice, or make assertions about the effects on student outcomes, though these are areas in which further research is greatly needed. However, this paper approaches this practice from the perspective that instructional quality is as much a function of institutional commitment to adjunct support, as of the adjuncts themselves. This paper will share insights about the use of online adjuncts at Florida Community College at Jacksonville (FCCJ), begin to build a profile of them, highlight some of the implications of supporting a "distant" staff, and provide a working support model.

Who are They and What Motivates Them?

Higher education administrators have always viewed using adjunct faculty as a cost-effective strategy, to fill gaps, particularly in high-demand areas that suffer from shortages of instructional staff. The plight of adjunct faculty has been well-addressed in the literature, including compensation, workload, benefits, access to professional development programs, and general isolation (Cassebaum, 2002; Fulton, 2000; Seifert, 2002; Wisneski, 2003). There is little literature dealing with the recent explosion of online adjunct faculty. Most would agree that the explosion of online courses has intensified instructional staffing dilemmas. For a growing number of institutions, national recruitment of online adjunct faculty seems a promising solution. By recruiting outside of the local community, colleges are able to attract a fascinating and highly diverse group of faculty, who are not only diverse geographically, but also bring a variety of backgrounds, motivations for teaching, and experience. However, the tasks of recruiting, developing, supporting and evaluating online adjuncts pose multiple challenges....

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