From the issue dated August 13, 2004
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Professors Seek Compensation for Online CoursesThey want extra pay or time off, but financially strapped colleges are reluctant
After 10 years of teaching accounting over cable and closed-circuit television, Dennis Smith says he feels pressure from administrators to put his courses online as well, to meet growing student demand. But Mr. Smith, a professor at Los Rios Community College, in Sacramento, Calif., believes that he should be given time off from teaching and extra pay if he is going to put in the additional effort to convert his courses, which he says will be more time-consuming to deliver online. According to college policy, the extra time he takes to develop the online courses would come out of his sabbatical. But Mr. Smith argues that sabbaticals are meant to benefit professors, not administrators. "They're using our sabbaticals to promote their technological dreams," he says. "The administration is essentially getting a free ride." As president of the Los Rios College Federation of Teachers, a faculty union, Mr. Smith has tried unsuccessfully to get extra pay and time off for professors who develop and teach online courses. Administrators note that under current policy, the online version of a course belongs to the professor. If Los Rios were to provide time off or extra pay, they argue, then the college should own the course. Mr. Smith says the union is against letting the college own courses created by its faculty members. Administrators have not ruled out changing the approach. A growing number of faculty unions are fighting for language in their contracts that guarantees such compensation when professors get involved in online education. At the same time, many colleges take the position that online courses have become so mainstream that producing them should be just another part of a faculty member's workload, especially since budgets are tight. A recently published study found that the extra pay that professors receive for online development fell 14 percent between 1999 and 2002. "It's a real issue," asserts Robert Callahan, a national representative of the American Federation of Teachers. "As of yet there aren't any standards that are emerging." Contract language is all over the map, he asserts, with some institutions providing better compensation than others. Online education has been popular for only a few years, and it is important to establish standards for online compensation early, Mr. Callahan says. "Because it's a fundamental change to the faculty-student relationship," he says, "the rules are unwritten." More Time and Effort Professors argue that creating and teaching online courses often take more time and effort than developing traditional courses: Instead of having the option of winging a lecture in a classroom, a professor has to prepare text, video, and other materials well in advance so they can be included in the electronic version. And teaching an online course can be more time-consuming than teaching in a classroom, since online students often e-mail questions to professors day and night, questions that must be answered individually and speedily. At Los Rios, Mr. Smith is asking that each faculty member developing an online course get time off equivalent to teaching one three-hour course in a semester. In addition, the union wants faculty members to be paid double for the online course during the first semester after development. The current system of using sabbatical time for online-course development is unfair, says Mr. Smith. Instructors are eligible for a semester-long sabbatical after working for seven years. Many faculty members, he says, want to use that time off to catch up on changes in their respective fields, so that their classroom performance will match what is going on in the real world. "It dilutes what sabbaticals are for," he says. "It's supposed to refresh you." The college's contract with its professors expires in June 2005. Negotiations for a new contract are set to resume in the fall. So far, Mr. Smith says, the union and the administration have agreed on language for several other issues raised by online courses, including privacy, intellectual property, access to equipment, and academic freedom. "We've got everything but the time and money," he says. "Sometimes you ask for more than you expect." Marlin (Skip) Davies, a deputy chancellor at Los Rios, says the college will occasionally give a professor extra time and money for developing and teaching an online course without dipping into the sabbatical, but not often. "Sabbatical would be the most frequently used for course-development process," he says. When professors are paid extra for their work, they have to give up ownership of the intellectual property, Mr. Davies says. "If we've paid them for it, it belongs to us," he says. "If they've done it on their own time, it belongs to them." He would not say whether administrators would agree to routinely provide extra time and money, noting that discussions are still under way. "We're very open to discussion," Mr. Davies says. "That's something that will have to be negotiated." Serving Remote Students Many faculty members have gone ahead and created online courses without added compensation, Mr. Smith says. But that is often because they do not realize how much work is involved -- and by the time they do, they are stuck teaching the courses, he says. Distance education is important to students in Northern California, where Los Rios is located, he says, because students are spread over a wide area. The telecourse that Mr. Smith teaches works pretty well, he says. Students watch the lectures on a closed-circuit television system that is connected to various sites. He interacts with students by telephone as they call in with questions or comments during class sessions. He wants to put the course online so that students can gain access at their convenience. "But I am not going to do it unless we're successful negotiating," he says. Marty Hittelman, president of the Community College Council of the California Federation of Teachers, says it is tough to get the compensation guaranteed in contracts because colleges are facing tight budgets. "As we get more and more into budget crisis, as we have in California, you have to save money," he says. "It's always a proposal, but we're rarely able to get it signed." When online education was getting off the ground nationwide, many of the courses were started with grants, says Russell Poulin, associate director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. "The money isn't there anymore," he says. Traditional courses now often include online components as well. Some courses use a "hybrid" model, in which students meet part of the time in a classroom and part of the time virtually in, say, an Internet chat room. That flexibility makes online-only courses seem like less of a novelty that needs extra effort to teach, he says. Such courses are becoming so common that many institutions consider their creation to be just part of a professor's job, he says. Less Compensation Recent studies show that faculty unions have their work cut out for them in fighting for extra compensation for online courses. Catherine C. Schifter, an associate professor of education at Temple University, has conducted two surveys on faculty-compensation issues, one in 1999 and one in 2002. Results from the more recent survey were published this spring in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. She polled faculty members at several colleges, including two-year and four-year institutions, asking how much "overload pay" the professors received for putting in extra time to work on online courses. What she found was a decrease in the amount of that extra pay. In the 1999 survey, the average minimum overload pay was $1,885. In 2002 it was $1,620, a decrease of 14 percent. The average maximum overload pay also dropped, from $4,097 in 1999 to $2,740 in 2002, a 33-percent decline. While differences in salary and hours spent working may be partly responsible for the decrease in overload pay, the amount of the drop-off is significant, Ms. Schifter says. "I'm not sure that it paints a rosy picture." The proportion of faculty members surveyed who "often" received time off to develop online courses also dropped, from 13 percent in 1999 to 10 percent in 2002. However, the percentage of those who often received extra compensation for online teaching increased from 26 percent in 1999 to 28 percent in 2002. Private institutions tended to offer less overload pay than public institutions. And two-year institutions, like community colleges, offered less than four-year colleges, she says. Ms. Schifter points out that faculty members now often work with teams of people, including technology specialists and instructional designers, to create online courses, which mitigates the impact of course development on professors' time. "It's not seen as being much of a burden," she says. "That's not to say that for many people it's not a burden. It's a lot of work." According to her studies, institutions are more likely than before to provide additional equipment and software to help professors create online courses. Such resources cost money, but faculty members do not see them as compensation. "Faculty don't necessarily consider that, because that doesn't go into their milk money," Ms. Schifter says. Some Union Victories Some faculty groups have gained ground on the issue. Cynthia E. Villanti, chairwoman of the New York State United Teachers' committee on distance education for community colleges, says she has worked with several colleges to include contract language on compensation for online-course development. "Not as many colleges as we'd like offer compensation," she says. The union was able to get such language at Mohawk Valley Community College, in upstate New York, where Ms. Villanti is an assistant professor of English. The contract there stipulates that faculty members get $1,100 to develop their first three-credit-hour online course, and $850 for each subsequent online course. They also get $1,000 to teach the first semester of their first online courses. For subsequent online courses, they get $850. Ms. Villanti says she is trying to persuade other institutions in the state to compensate faculty members for creating online courses. "It acknowledges their labor," she says. "The first time you develop an online course, it's very time-consuming." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 50, Issue 49, Page A27 | |||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education