Does anyone teach at Western Governors University? What platform do they use? What is the pay for adjuncts and for full time?
I can only tell you a few things I gleaned from my contacts while attending WGU. There are course mentors and student mentors. Course mentors are mostly part-time. They help design assessments and courses of study, plus assist students with issues/questions regarding their studies. Student mentors keep track of student progress, provide access to resources and stay in touch with their assigned students. I've heard of student mentors having up to 100 students to keep track of, although that number has dropped if I understand correctly. Students are allowed to pass courses based on assessments of competency in their subject matter. These are either objective assessments (exams) or performance assessments (papers, etc.). Objective assessments are administered by external vendors such as Prometric. Performance assessments are turned in to an outside company called Taskstream, which does the grading. I understand WGU is moving to bring performance assessment grading in-house, but I understand they will be keeping Taskstream as the interface for that. I have heard commentary that many WGU mentors moonlight for Taskstream, but have not had direct confirmation of this. Course grading for WGU is strictly pass-fail, but performance assessments receive per-assessment marks on a scale of 1 to 4, with 3 a passing grade. Anything less than a 3 score or a fail on an explicitly listed requirement of a performance assessment, the performance assessment is returned to the student for correction/resubmission. As far as pay-- I don't remember the numbers, but that it was decent for student mentors if they have a fair number of students.
