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April 22, 2009, 11:21 AM ET
AAUP: Online Education Based on 'Slave Labor'
An American Association of University Professors official blasted the business model of online education in a recent interview with Alabama’s Times Daily.
“The economic underpinning of a lot of online education is that it amounts to slave labor,” said Martin Snyder, director of the AAUP’s Department of External Relations as well as its Planning and Development Office.
The context for the quote was a story dealing in part with problems faced by faculty in online education, such as compensation and workload. Most who teach online courses “are part-time professors who can’t get full-time work and are forced into taking a lot of part-time positions in order to try to make an equitable salary,” Mr. Snyder said.
Top administrators from two major distance-education players — the University of Maryland University College and Capella University — were questioned about faculty compensation during The Chronicle’s Technology Forum earlier this month.
For adjuncts, their responses amounted to not much. Both paid in the $3,000 range per course. —Marc Parry
Categories: Distance-Education
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