For Online Adjuncts, a Seller's Market

Colloquy: Join an online discussion about whether a reliance on adjunct faculty members, spurred by a boom in distance learning, is hurting the quality of online education. Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

Ruth Achterhof won't say how many courses she teaches, for fear that her employers will think the workload is too much for her to handle.

But the work is enough to earn her about $90,000 per year, she says.

"I'm afraid my schools will go, 'Holy smoke! How does she do that?'"

Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador lies curled at her feet. She hardly ever sees a campus, spending much of her time at home here in a 100-year-old cottage next to a small lake.

Being a virtual adjunct, she says, means never having to play office politics or worry about ticking off her supervisors. And if any gig goes sour, it's easy for her to pick up another one.

"It's good to have backup schools because you don't ever know if a dean is going to change or if I'll make a faux pas," she says. "So it's OK if I lose one."

But she is in no danger of losing any of her jobs right now. In fact, Ms. Achterhof and other online adjuncts are in high demand, as colleges increasingly turn to part-time faculty members to help expand their distance-education programs.

The strategy saves money for colleges, most of which are dealing with tight budgets. Also, full-time faculty members are often reluctant to make the leap from the familiar setting of the lecture hall to the unknown arena of the virtual classroom.

Some critics say, however, that the quality of distance-education programs might be threatened by the presence of so many part-timers. And faculty unions argue that increases in part-time faculty jobs, even if online, further limit the prospects of both full-time faculty members and adjuncts who want permanent teaching positions.

Long Hours

Ms. Achterhof is perhaps an extreme example of what some are calling a new breed of adjunct professor. She did not start her career in academe. She used to own and run a cafe called Andre's, in Grand Haven, Mich. Later she earned her master's in educational leadership and her doctorate in organization and management and taught traditional courses for a few years at Baker College. She was offered $35,000 a year to teach there permanently, but in the late 1990s she found that online teaching was a better fit -- and more lucrative, too.

Now she makes more money and can set her own schedule, teaching courses like "Leadership Development" and "Negotiation and Dispute Resolution" to students who log on at their convenience.

Most of her days are spent reading e-mail messages in her small, wood-paneled home office. A vast majority are students' responses to study questions, or student essays or other assignments for her to grade.

She quickly scrolls through the messages and types a response to each one. Occasionally she takes a break to do laundry, wash the dishes, or fix her husband some lunch.

The quantity of her correspondence is impressive. Her "sent" folder shows that she shipped out 2,554 e-mail messages between February 2 and March 18 -- an average of about 56 messages a day. Just about all of them are sprinkled with typographical smiley faces or other emoticons.

"Super great job. Good use of terms," she tells one student.

It helps that she can type 60 to 70 words per minute and read 1,200 words per minute. Otherwise she doesn't know how she could complete all of her work.

On Mondays and Tuesdays she starts her virtual teaching at about 8:30 a.m. and doesn't finish until around 11 p.m. "On Mondays and Tuesdays I am in my computer chair 14 hours a day," she says. "I tend to get grouchy as the day goes by."

The time she spends at her desk declines throughout the week, down to about four hours on Fridays and Saturdays. "Saturday is the day I try to get my mood back," she says. Sunday is a day of rest. Then it's Monday again.

How does she juggle the tasks? Organization.

She has lists of tasks for each class, and she makes check marks as she completes each item. A rolling rack of file folders sits next to her, one for each course she teaches. She has her tests and discussion questions ready to go for the whole semester, so she can cut and paste each one into the appropriate course Web site when the time comes.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

That's not to say things always go perfectly. One day Ms. Achterhof chastised a student by e-mail for answering three questions rather than four. But other student responses soon came in with three answers as well, and she realized that she had assigned only three questions that week.

She simply sent the student a quick note acknowledging her error and updated his grade.

Countless institutions -- including community colleges, mid-sized universities, and for-profit institutions -- now rely on adjuncts like Ms. Achterhof to teach much of their distance-education curriculum, say leaders in the field.

Jones International University, which is one of the places Ms. Achterhof teaches, has 125 adjuncts on its staff, with 20 to 40 of them teaching at any one time, says Pamela S. Pease, president of the university. That compares with six full-time teaching faculty members.

The adjuncts are highly qualified, with graduate degrees and work experience, she says. That is important to distance-education students, who tend to be older than traditional college students. "The adjunct faculty bring the real-world side to the course," she says.

"It's a new breed of faculty members who teach at multiple institutions," Ms. Pease says. "They're trying to put together their own work environment. Most of them are pretty independent."

Joe Schneider, deputy executive director at the American Association of School Administrators, says many school principals and superintendents find jobs teaching online as adjunct professors because colleges' permanent faculty members are not interested in those assignments.

"The regular faculty are very reluctant to do it because it's a lot of work, and they have enough clout to say no to the deans," Mr. Schneider says. "Universities who want to do it have to hire adjuncts to get it done."

Some observers, however, warn of online education's being overrun by adjunct professors. Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, says he is worried that colleges are taking advantage of their adjuncts.

The union, which represents 1.3 million professors and teachers, is not pleased about the growth in the number of virtual institutions that award degrees without any face-to-face interaction between professors and students.

"This is the convergence of two major issues that we've been following -- the growth of online education and overuse of adjuncts," Mr. Horwitz says.

With virtual professors becoming ever more numerous, the federation argues that teaching quality may suffer. It's not that online adjuncts don't have the credentials to teach, says Mr. Horwitz, but that instructors ought to be connected with a campus, interacting with other professors and holding office hours.

"We think that there are some very good adjuncts," he says. "But it doesn't matter how good you are if you aren't interacting with others who teach your subject, if you have less time available for students."

Avoiding Dependence

Some larger institutions have taken steps to avoid leaning heavily on adjunct professors to teach online courses.

The University of Illinois at Springfield, for example, tries to keep the proportion of adjuncts and permanent faculty members the same in online courses as in face-to-face ones, says Burks Oakley II, associate vice president for academic affairs. The same qualifications are expected of professors in each venue, he says, and the entrance requirements for the students are the same. Officials there don't want to create separate standards for online education. "We'd never even consider going in that direction," Mr. Oakley says. "That's why we say we have the same quality online that we do on campus."

Ms. Pease says Jones International has its own quality-control system for dealing with ineffective faculty members. For one thing, instructors are trained through the institution's certification process, and those who can't handle teaching online generally leave on their own initiative. "If they don't work out, they don't come back," she says.

And many of the online instructors do find ways of interacting with each other. Some institutions, for example, create online "faculty lounges" that allow professors to meet virtually, ask each other questions, and get advice on how to handle specific problems.

Ms. Achterhof says she regularly talks shop with her colleagues in such online lounges. There they discuss technology issues, teaching tips, and whatever else is on the instructors' minds. Professors recently attempted to determine how tough they should be on students for whom English is a second language. "You can go in and out and share topics with your peers," she says. "We discuss issues that faculty have always talked about and will always talk about."

Fewer Distractions

Not having to attend campus events is one benefit of being an online professor, says Ms. Achterhof, who happily notes that she never has to attend another faculty-senate meeting. "I don't have people popping in my office like I did on campus," she says. "By going online I get rid of a whole lot of meetings."

She taught classroom courses at only one institution -- Baker College, in Muskegon -- until the college established a policy that no professor could teach more than three courses per six-week period, or six per quarter.

She knew she could do more. So she decided to freelance online. Now she teaches master's and undergraduate courses in team dynamics, conflict resolution, management, and negotiating skills at three colleges -- Baker College Online, Jones International, and Davenport University -- and for the United Nations Development Program.

Ms. Achterhof, who is 55, acknowledges that her working life isn't for everybody. The scheduling limits Baker imposes are probably good for most faculty members, she says: "I understand the philosophy that there has to be a speed limit at 70 miles per hour even though some people are comfortable driving 90. I don't mind working 60 hours a week."

She still finds plenty of time to relax, including time to spend with her grandchildren. "I cook, I bake, I sew, I knit, I read," she says. "And I do sleep."

Ms. Achterhof says she can keep this up for years, although she may eventually reduce her teaching load. She jokes that she can keep teaching courses online as long as she posts a picture of a younger version of herself on her Web page, so her students won't know her real age.

"If I just keep that photograph there, then they'll never know that I'm 80," she says with laugh. "I would like to be teaching a class or two until I'm put in a box."