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March 24, 2009, 05:04 PM ET
Teaching Tech to the Adjuncts, and Admitting Some IT Mistakes
Philadelphia— Professors, to make a broad generalization, are not the keenest adapters of new technology. So at the SunGard Higher Education Summit here, it was refreshing to hear how Immaculata University got 366 faculty members—the institution has about 400 total—trained in an online course-management system in just a few months.
The university was starting to use a new system from Angel Learning. Richard C. Kralevich, director of academic technology at the university, said that one key in training was “recognizing that our faculty members are unique, and we treated them as individuals. We looked at the individual rather than the whole.” For example, when professors complained that Mr. Kralevich’s department was training them in groups that were too large, he agreed that that approach had been a mistake. “We switched to one on one, or two on one. And we held special sessions. It meant more work for us. But it really helped the faculty,” he says.
Another issue was training adjunct faculty members; the university has about about 200 of them, along with about 200 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. Many institutions do not offer technology training to adjuncts. The attitude seems to be that training is a wasted investment on someone who might not be around the next semester. Mr. Kralevich, however, says that “we looked at other institutions comparable to Immaculata, and it seemed like the ones that had the most success with online learning were the ones that invested in their adjuncts.”
He said that he went to the administration, and “I said, ‘Let’s treat our adjuncts like everyone else.’ And they said, ‘Go for it.’ So we did.”
That approach even makes sense economically, Mr. Kralevich said. The institution wanted to enroll more adult students in online courses, and training adjuncts allowed that to happen. And that brought in more revenue, which paid for the training. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Teaching
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