Future of online adjuncting....

I saw a segment on television about the future of higher education. The host was questioning panel members on distance education. Many of them agreed that with soaring energy costs that online learning was a venue of untapped potential. I am curious to know what many of you in the online adjuncting business think. It seemes to me that taking things like gas prices into account, distance ed in the form of online learning could be poised to grow. I am interested in going "online" and I would also be interested in hearing about your search for that online gig.

 

It took me 18 months after I got my masters to get my first online teaching gig. Then six months later my second. I just got the opportuity to get school number three but it did not work out, I was too busy to committe properly. Overall, I have been teaching online almost 2.5 years.

I would look for the top school (online school that is). Check out this thread -
http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?t=27625

 

It has its pros and cons. Its main pro is that you can search for work in any school in the US and the world regardless of your location. The main problem is major competition and low salaries. Salaries tend to go lower in the online business since you have more people with the credentials willing to do it and you are competing with people in countries where the life cost is a lot lower than the US and Canada.

Job security is pretty low, I teach for 3 online schools and one school dropped me without any reason. Another school stopped giving me gigs and it was after so many phone calls that they started giving contracts again.

The other problem is that some schools only evaluate you based on online evaluations and have a quota to keep giving you courses. This means that basically you need to make sure that you have no "unhappy" customers and this might mean grade inflation and low academic standards. The school has academic standards but the minute you try to enforce them you will have low evaluations so if it is job security that you want you need to make sure that students get their As.

In general is a good way to get extra money if you already teach for an on ground program with some job security and benefits but not a good idea if you want to do it full time. It seems that this is the way things are going now and you will need to do it like it or not, my problem is that this seems to be making salaries lower and with less job security. I'm also convinced that online courses might lead to lower academic standards if not managed properly, online adjuncts feel pressure to get high online evaluations and this means grade inflation for many cases.

 

I don't agree with this. I do not inflate grades to make students happy. I do give them options to make up work for partial credit to help them learn and pass but never give a "free ride" to get a good eval. I guess it is more important to me to be fair and even across the board. How could I justify giving one student full credit when they posted 10 times and another full credit if they posted once and it was late and the comment was something like "I agree".

 

I also do not give my students a free ride and at the colleges where I work as an adjunct, we are fortunate to have a culture where no free rides or easy grades are allowed. I do the make up option thing as well and extra credit, but these assignments are normally written papers, where the student has to do research.

 

I also disagree; the only time I ever had a course where every member earned a "A" or "A-", I got a somewhat terse e-mail from one of the faculty evaluators asking me to explain why. After a review of the course and submitted assignments it all worked out fine, but that taught me that grade inflation is a myth, at least at UoP.

 

I also don't give free rides. My students have plenty of opportunities to excel in my classes. If they apply themselves, then they tend to do well overall. However, if they choose to rush through the course, they tend to do poorly. I won't hesitate to hand a student a D or an F. It's not that I want to see my students do poorly, but, if I am about to assign one of those grades, then the student earned it.

 

I agree. I do not offer extra credit opportunities in my classes. To me, extra credit gives the student the ability to substitute quantity for quality.

 

I also don't give As to everyone but when I started teaching online at for profit schools, I noticed that you cannot give too many bad grades since you need to maintain a high student evaluation average. Schools should not only use student evaluations to assign courses but also some kind of quality control that checks academic standards. When I started teaching online, I was assigned some difficult engineering courses and I was almost forced to fail students due to bad performance, my evaluations came lower than average and I was given a warning. I had no choice but to low my standards and assign better grades that I normally do so my evaluations came much better later.

I'm not saying that one should give free rides but you cannot be as strict as courses taught on ground at state universities since you are only given work based on student evaluations and nothing else. This might be seen as a disadvantage in my opinion but this is only a personal one.