Online education is continually evolving and changing over time. One topic that comes up frequently when discussing online education is the significant number of adjunct employees who teach online.
For colleges and universities, adjuncts are perfect because they do a large amount of work for very low pay. This helps schools to reduce their bottom line and provide courses to students at a lower cost. Schools hope that with a competitive cost, more students will be recruited to attend the school – which raises the need for more classes, mostly taught by more adjuncts. It can quickly become a vicious cycle.
As online education grows, online colleges and universities are growing with it — typically in the form of a larger base of online adjuncts. The abundance of adjunct faculty causes some controversy. Adjuncts are typically grossly underpaid and usually teach for multiple schools or work a separate full-time job in order to make a living wage. While some adjuncts are obviously phenomenal teachers and teach because they love the job, others are teaching to make extra money or teaching for so many schools that they can’t begin to fully engage students or provide their courses with the guidance necessary. However, colleges continue to increase their adjunct faculty pool as they are very important to the overall concept of distance learning and most online programs would not be able to survive without them.
For most online colleges and universities, a large majority of their faculty are adjunct instructors who work remotely from all over the country – sometimes from all over the world. Due to the asynchronous nature of many online courses, adjunct faculty can live anywhere and conduct a class, answer student emails, and even hold a full-time position or teach for numerous schools. For many, this can be a worthwhile investment of time and energy – adjuncting in retirement, adjuncting while raising a family, etc.
Overtime, more of a push is starting for online colleges and universities to hire more full-time faculty. While this is helping to a certain extent, many schools still have 3 or 4 full-time faculty with 100-300 adjuncts who also teach in a specific area. Needless to say, the issue is not one that is resolving quickly and it is mostly due to the bottom line. For the schools, hiring adjuncts to teach courses on a class-by-class basis is significantly cheaper than hiring full-time faculty members – especially when one considers benefits such as retirement, health benefits, etc.
As online adjunct positions have increased over the last decade, colleges have been able to become decisively more selective regarding who they hire, how much they pay, and how many classes an adjunct can teach at a time. These factors have caused existing adjuncts to take on numerous positions (some up to 10 at a time). Arguably, leading to less engagement with students and lower quality courses overall. While there is a large pool of instructors willing to adjunct, there are also many who find they don’t have what it takes to balance numerous schools and commitments.
Schools are currently working to find ways to prevent issues with adjunct faculty, but for most online schools which are typically for-profit, the benefit of adjuncts outweighs the negatives, making adjuncts an asset to online education that can’t be overlooked.
About the Author
Jamie Weitl is a WAHM teaching for several online universities and raising three precocious little ones. In her spare time she enjoys writing, baking, and running. For more info, see my Google Plus Profile.
