Many online postings want professional letters of recommendation. Being that I teach online it seems weird to request a letter of recommendation from a supervisor who I've never met and only email a few times a month. Does anyone think it weird to request a letter form an online supervisor? If have a different supervisor each time I teach a new course. Since the courses are only five weeks long we don't really get to know each other. Over the past year I've had a few of the same supervisors multiple times... I don't know. What do you think?
I think asking is free. If you send a friendly email to one of the ones you've had more than once, and explain the situation, I'd think most people would at least be sympathetic. -=Steve=-
If this was your first post, I would have thought you were a spammer :biggrin: Anyway, if you don't mind the opinion of a total outsider to the teaching world, I think Steve is right
I have been there. Many full time teaching positions require letters of recommendation. The question is, what if I only have online teaching experience? Most online schools have very little interaction with online teachers so asking for letters can be difficult. At some point, I was teaching for 7 online schools before I became full time faculty, I requested letters to all of them but only 3 submitted letters and out of these two were really useless as they were only templates with very general information. The only one that I submitted was questioned by the hiring committee as it was from an online for profit school that nobody knew and it was not taken so seriously compared to my letters from my dissertation supervisor and brick and mortar school. In few words, I would ask to all the online schools that I teach for a letter but only ask them to be sent to you directly rather than the hiring school with a copy to you. If you feel that the letter would do more harm than good, just don't send it. Template letters give the impression that you were a below average instructor that barely was able to keep the job. Many B&M schools don't understand that schools like Devry handle hundreds of online instructors so the chair barely knows you even if you do a good job. Letters from B&M schools are preferred so try to get these ones first unless you don't teach for none of them. Be ready to defend the fact that your referees are hundreds of miles away from you.
I have 2 DL science instructors writing letters of rec for me, and so far that's a "yes" from 100% of the people I have asked
My staff and I have access to quite a bit of information about our online faculty. In addition to my direct communication (usually via e-mail and phone), there are student evaluations, student complaints, (positive and negative) interactions between the faculty member and our staff, activity reports generated from our learning management system, timeliness in posting attendance and grades, timeliness in answering student inquiries, activity (or lack thereof) in class discussion forums, etc. Using a variety of different data sources, we can determine which of our faculty are strong, which need some extra help and which should no longer be teaching with us. I would have no trouble at all writing letters of recommendation for our strongest faculty.
