U. of P. training and expectations

Folks,

I would like to know how you guys feel about U. of Phoenix.

For me I have found the four week training to be rigorous and with absolutely no pay. I find it somewhat abusive.

I just found out that we have to evaluate each student in a 20 student class every week for 8 weeks. Apparently it has to be substantial. That is about 160 evaluations not to mention all the postings you have to do in the classroom.

Am I missing something here?

Also, they just pay Ph.D.'s for this kind of work a meagerly 1,200 dollars. I saw that Argosy pays twice that for a similar class.

What has been your experience? I say somewhere that U. of P. is considered an academic sweat shop. Any thoughts?

 

Blackbird,

I am not mistaken this has been indirectly and directly disused in this board, according to some, they do it for the glory. But if you do it for the money, with UOP you are out of luck. That is how they make their billions, slave wages and charge outrages tuition.

 

I am not sure where you get the eight week courses, but all of my courses are five or six weeks. Your wage figures are a little low as well. I consider UOP a "starter school" and have managed to leverage my experience there to get better paying adjunct gigs.

My experience may be different from some, but I teach really small classes primarily in the CJ, org. security, and public administration programs. Usually I have 4-8 students per class. I have taught the same classes numeous times, so a substantial portion of my work is already done in terms of materials.

With the small classes I teach and the five/six week terms I have managed to get my UOP rate of dollars per student/per week to a rate comparable with several of the other schools I teach at with higher pay.

 

I failed out of the UoP training - it was too much and bad timing. I posted the details In this thread. I have a friend teaching for them (her first online teaching gig) and she said it is way too demanding for the pay.

 

I made it through their training and taught one environmental science class. Decided that it wasn't worth it. The pay was not that great; however, my local community college doesn't pay much better. UoP was not a very pleasant school to work for. At the local community college they treat their adjuncts with great respect. The chancellor has even taken the time to say thank you for the hard work. At UoP you feel like you are a slave laborer.

 

I've just passed the training...

and I will be teaching my first class for them shortly (online). I'm teaching at the grad level, which should be challenging, and in a new content area. I'm doing it for the challenge and also like Truckie, I want to leverage it. I've been told on good authority that the teaching is more fun than the training, which was intense and demanding but somewhat boring: It was set up to weed people out, IMHO.

I've been teaching for the community college for three years now (macro and microeconomics) and it is no longer exciting, although the pay is ok. I have ~33 students per class (cap is 30, but I usually let extras in and then some drop so I end up with about 27). The format is different than UoP and I have weekly automated quizzes so there is less active feedback required. There are 11 weeks a term, plus finals week, which makes for a long haul.

For UoP, there will be 10-20 students and the grad classes are six weeks. I figure with 5 postings 5 days a week, each student will get at least one feedback per week. Not too much, certainly more than I got as a grad student. I don't think it will be overwhelming for me but I enjoy posting (maybe I won't be posting here as much!).

I have three target institutions for which I REALLY want to adjunct, and if I get hired by any of those (or a few on my second tier) I'll drop UoP.

 

Well...what are the targets?

 

My all-time top is my alma mater, Regis.

 

You are not missing anything, as more online PhDs are granted, you have an army of PhDs willing to work for less. It is a win win situation for the online school. You are paying them a fortune to grant you the online PhD but they pay you peanuts once you graduate. They keep paying the media to post articles that show this "shortage" of qualified business teachers and how Universities are willing to pay 100K for a fresh graduate in order to fish more potential online PhD students. At the end, it is business!

 

When I took the training there were several other folks that had also just received their masters or doctorates (PhD and EdD) in the online training. Most had also completed them online. I was an exception as I had completed mine face-to-face.

While they have an army of PhDs willing to work for less initially; most will only last through a few classes. I lasted through one class. My sister-in-law lasted through two. A close friend managed to last six months. For a while he was doubled up on classes.

In the only class I taught for UoP my "mentor" would count the number of words in my responses. If I had too few words I would get an email that I had not created a substantial reply. Apparently at UoP it does not pay to be succinct. Quantity is superior to quality at all times.

 

I just interacted with an online educator who teaches at six institutions of higher learning. He shared that he just quit teaching for U. of P. because
of the poor quality of students, their business model, which was to “send as many notes as you possibly can—and to heck with the quality.”

 

How about their on-campus locations? Anyone know how those adjuncts are treated?

 

As training is not paid and people doing training is also probably paid peanuts, it is cheaper to keep training faculty rather than keeping faculty with higher salaries.

As the pool of PhDs keeps increasing, it makes more sense to keep training faculty rather than increase salaries.

This seems to be a cash cow. The University has an increasing number of its own online graduates from MBA and DBA programs that might eventually become cheap labour.

Many online schools have similar models. I have trained for few schools with no paid training and never was given courses.

Another model is to pay you based on the number of enrolled students. This is pretty pathetic as the school transfers the risk to the faculty. In few words, if there is low enrollment, the school never loses money as the faculty is paid only a fraction of the fees.

Job security sucks also, you can be given steady work for a while before a person with better credentials willing to make less or the same comes along. The school has no obligation with you so if a better prospect becomes available, you become history.

 

There's no difference. It's four week's training without pay and $1200 per course afterwards. I left after 14 months. I taught for U of P at their Jersey City, NJ campus from 2004 to 2005. I became a contract employee after 6 months but things didn't change. To me, it was like a slave labor. I left when I couldn't take it anymore.

 

The problem is that this type of academic inbreeding is frowned upon by regional accreditation bodies.

 

I just passed their (Phoenix) lab exercise, and am scheduled for the training 5/5. From reviewing some of the comments, the training sounds like Hell. Any words of advice?


Also, the pay scale is not superlative, since I only have a Masters, it's $900 for 5 weeks. If you pass the training, are the syllabus, discussion questions, assignments, tests, etc., all canned for you, or do you have to prepare all that too? If so, my effective wage would be about $1 per hour.

My nephew has never taught at Phoenix, but has DONE IT ONLINE AT KAPLAN AND ELLIS FOR YEARS. HE SAYS ALL OF THE ABOVE IS PREPARED FOR YOU, YOU JUST NEED TO MODERATE WELL, ETC.

ANY COMMENTS WOULD BE APPRECIATED, such as where to apply to Ellis and which online schools pay the best-My nephew couldn't even find the link for Ellis appplications..

Sorry for the mixed caps, I hit the caps lock key by mistake.

Thanks.

 

Do a search, I posted why I failed out of the training.

 

I'm just finishing up teaching my first class for them. Once I have my final evaluation, I'll post something here about the entire experience, from application to instruction.

 

Re_Online Teaching

I also failed the UOP faculty training...bad timing...and I do think it was too much...I am a student at Argosy ...and I am pretty positive their faculty training is not that rigorous...The recruiter at UOP told me I can try back in 12 months...I was so offended...Where else can I go...for a first timer...please advise...Thanks