There is a fascinating essay today at Inside Higher Ed giving an inside, first-person view of being an adjunct professor.
2015 is my 25th year of adjunct teaching. In the fall I will teach my 500th three-credit college course. I have put in many 14- to 16-hour days, with many 70- to 80-hour weeks. My record is 27 courses in one year, although I could not do that now.
I want to share my thoughts on adjunct teaching. I write anonymously to not jeopardize my precarious positions. How typical is my situation?
The whole essay is worth reading, as it gives a great view into what the modern university and the implications of using adjuncts. But I want to highlight one paragraph in particular that captures the challenge of understanding online education.
I have taught many online courses. We have tapped about 10 percent of the potential of online courses for teaching. But rather than exploring the untapped 90 percent, the college where I taught online wanted to standardize every course with a template designed by tech people with no input from instructors.
I want to design amazing online courses: courses so intriguing and intuitive and so easy to follow no one would ever need a tutorial. I want to design courses that got students eager to explore new things. Let me be clear, I am not talking about gimmicks and entertainment; I am talking about real learning. Is anyone interested in this?
It is naive to frame the debate over online education as solely, or primarily, an issue of faculty resistance. Yes, there are faculty members who are against online education, but one reason for this resistance is a legitimate concern for the quality of courses. What the essay reminds us is that part of the quality issue arises from structural issues from the university and not from the actual potential of well-design and well-taught online courses.
David Dickens at Google+ had an interesting comment based on the “tech people” reference that points to the other side of the same coin.
As a tech guy I can tell you, we’d love to have the time and tools to work with motivated adjuncts (or anyone else), but often times we have to put out something that will work for everyone, will scale, and will be complete and tested before the end of the week.
It is endlessly frustrating to know that there is so much more that could be done. After all, we tech folks are completely submerged in our personal lives with much more awesome tech than we can include in these sorts of “products” as we are constrained to publish them.
There is an immense difference between A) the quality of online education and B) the quality of well-designed and well-taught online education, and that is even different than C) the potential of online education. It is a mistake to conflate A), B), and C).
Update: David is on a roll while in discussion with George Station. This clarification builds on the theme of this post.
My point is that IT isn’t the barrier, but rather we are the mask behind which all the real barriers like to hide. We’d love to do more but can’t, and we get put in the position of taking the blows that should be directed towards the underlying issues.
The essay in IHE and the comments here makes one want to ask a series of questions:
a) is this a manifestation of the child’s rhyme, “this is the house that jack built (or better, from the Space Child’s Mother Goose, is this the theory that Jack built) basically echoing the Christensen disruptive metaphor where the HEI’s are like the US auto manufacturers adding whimsy to a failing or non-competitive product. There is ample evidence that this is happening
b) Publish/Perish tenure based on number of articles in refereed, high impact journals with the increasing proliferation of venues could be a sign at the other end of the academic hierarchy?
c) Looking at Bologna, Coursera, EdX, etc can “harmonization” in its various forms be inevitable?
Can shift to competency as a student measure and measure for an institution’s accreditation be
on the horizon especially when government funding seems to be leaning in that direction.
d) as even public universities go virtual and international with the need to seek income, is the cost
for basic under graduate cognitive skill certification becoming moot as to how it is obtained or
vetted?
The Lone Ranger (LR) approach to content development is very expensive when you are only able to spread the costs over a few students located at one school. Nevertheless, the quality of the content created with the long-ranger approach is typically poor compared to the quality of the content created with the Professional Development Team (PDT) approach.
Of course, the total cost of the PDT approach is expensive relative to the LR approach.
But to calculate per-student costs, you need to divide the total cost by the number of students who use the content.
Therefore, in a mass market the per-student cost is lower with the PDT approach as compared with multiple, redundant LR projects – one at each university.
Eventually, MOOCs may evolve into online textbooks, and a winner-take-all market may emerge.
In winner-take-all markets, a few get very rich, which rubs many in higher education the wrong way.
But, as long as faculty at traditional schools want to maintain their academic freedom to choose textbooks – whether they are online or not, and whether they are commercial or not – then I do not see a viable, open alternative to a commercial winner-take-all market of online textbooks and courses.
If there was some way to guarantee that the content would be used, then the federal government or a large coalition of schools (around 1000 schools) could finance a PDT approach. I explain this in my article on the Case for Creative Commons Textbooks.
Lone Ranger Approach – Tony Bates
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2014/03/tony-bates-on-lone-ranger-model-of.html
“In most countries, tenured faculty have considerable autonomy with regard to teaching. Especially in research universities, there is a long history of faculty writing grant proposals for research purposes, and this model has been extended to cover innovative approaches to teaching. Consequently, the most common approach to encouraging the use of technology, at least in universities in the United States and Canada, has been to provide funding for a part-time graduate student and some equipment or software.”
“Thus, technology-based materials are increasingly being initiated and developed by faculty through what I call the Lone Ranger and Tonto approach. Tonto is the computer-skilled graduate student who does the HTML markup and scanning and generally tries to keep the professor out of technical trouble.”
Professional Development Team Approach – David L. Kirp
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2014/02/david-l-kirp-on-british-open-university.html
“When a new course is to be designed [at the British Open University], a battalion of experts gathers at Milton Keynes; during the next year and a half, this group turns out draft syllabi, visions, revisions, evaluations, paper topics, and examinations. OU’s professors take the lead: the nine hundred faculty members, many of them recruited from similar posts at other British universities, are expected to be pedagogues as well as scholars. The team also includes senior tutors, who supervise instruction when the course is in the field; text editors, who sharpen the prose of books specially written for the course; TV producers; software designers; test and measurement specialists; library consultants; outside assessors, who critique what’s being prepared – as many as forty people working together on a single project. A ‘caretaker course team’ does periodic updates, and after eight years the course is entirely rebuilt.”
Winner-Take-All Markets
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2014/02/higher-education-ultimate-winner-take.html
“[These are] what Philip Cook and I have called ‘winner-take-all markets’. … Such markets have long been familiar in entertainment and sports. The best soprano may be only marginally better than the second-best, but in a world in which most people listen to music on compact discs, there is little need for the second-best. In such a world, the best soprano may earn a seven-figure annual salary while the second-best struggles to get by. In similar fashion, new technologies allow us to clone the services of the most talented performers in a growing number of occupations, thereby enabling them to serve ever broader and more lucrative markets.”
The Case for Creative Commons Textbooks (2005)
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2010/09/case-for-creative-commons-textbooks.html
This is an article I wrote back in 2005. It starts with a discussion of the high cost of textbooks ($900/year per student), and then considers a very novel idea for financing an open alternative to commercial textbooks. Specifically, it starts by adding up money the British Open University spends on its online courses annually (up to $3 million dollars a course). Then it calculates how much it would cost for a coalition of 1,000 schools to buy out the British Open University. The objective of doing so would be to put 200 of their online courses in the public domain. This would cost the coalition up to $75 million per year in total, or $75,000 per school per year. Finally, it points out that for a school the size of UC Berkelely, which has 23,000 undergraduates, this would work out to $3.26 per student per year.
Here a blog post that essentially repeats what I said in my earlier comment.
Why A Commercial Winner-Take-All Market May Be The Only Viable Solution For Developing High Quality Course Content
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-commercial-winner-take-all-market.html