How to Find a Job Teaching On-Line
by Evelyn Beck
CAROL CONRAD HAS continued to teach on-line business courses for two California colleges despite moving first to Virginia and then to Florida.
“If the student can be anywhere, why not the instructor?” she says.
As distance education offers greater flexibility for students, so it has also meant more options for adjunct faculty, who are invited in an increasing number of advertisements to teach from their home locations. Cerro Coso Community College currently employs sixteen instructors who don’t live near the college’s five sites in northern California, and they’re looking for more.
“I live 180 miles away from our largest site that houses my boss,” says Matt Hightower, director of Cerro Coso Online. “In many ways it’s an advantage.”
Arizona’s University of Phoenix Online, which has 3,000 instructors, also actively recruits teachers nationally, as does the University of Illinois Online in Urbana, Illinois; Saint Leo University in Saint Leo, Florida; and Cardean University in Deerfield, Illinois, just to name some of the more visible distance education programs. Requirements typically include a master’s degree and on-line teaching experience or training. While instructors used to being on the campus where they teach might find it odd to work for a college they’ve never even visited, many involved in distance teaching insist that it works just fine.
“I don’t really foresee any challenges for instructors that I never see as long as they are well trained,” says Hightower.
Conrad agrees. “We haven’t found any differences with me being far away,” she says. “If I need somehow to contact students, I do so through the on-line office at the college via e-mail, and they contact them.”
This kind of remote teaching isn’t seamless for everyone, however. Tom McNicholas, an adjunct business instructor at Napa Valley Community College in Napa, California, and a project manager for ChevronTexaco, tried virtual teaching for the University of Phoenix Online but ran into software problems.
“The UOP software butted up against the firewall on my company’s system and everything went haywire,” he says. “I had to have the techs reload my whole system.”
Instead, he opted for face-to-face classes at some of UOP’s leased facilities in northern California. Each college chooses its own operating system for on-line instruction, and an adjunct teaching on-line for several colleges may have to learn a number of different systems and probably complete each college’s on-line training, which often lasts at least four weeks. That training tends to be free, but some colleges charge enrolled faculty a fee. Maneuvering among different on-line environments can be very confusing, especially initially.
Personally, I have spent the past three years getting used to creating pages in Microsoft Word and FrontPage, then uploading them to my college’s WebCT system. Now that I’m venturing out into the great wide world of teaching at a distance, I’m a bit bewildered as I plot my way through an environment that relies totally on FrontPage, even though I have had some experience with that software. Technical support, available via e-mail or a toll-free number, is vital. Finding out whether it’s available around the clock is important, especially if you’re teaching across time zones or doing your teaching in the middle of the night.
Some on-line instructors are responsible for course development or adaptation, as well. That can mean extra pay — or not. And it’s important to find out who owns any course that you develop, especially as you take your teaching career on-line. Course schedules can vary wildly, with some credit courses lasting only five weeks (like those at UOP) and some lasting an entire quarter or semester. Start times vary as well, with some colleges starting different classes each week. Class sizes and salaries cover a wide range, too.
Cerro Coso Online pays about $2,100 for a sixteen-week course with thirty to forty students. UOP pays $900 for a five-week course with eight to fifteen students, with two small raises awarded based on experience. Guidelines usually suggest that an on-line instructor should expect to spend about ten to twenty hours per week on an on-line course, though that number depends on course duration and instructor experience. The University of Illinois requires that its on-line instructors need to be on-line every day, at least five days a week.
Most courses operate asynchronously, allowing for great flexibility about when an instructor actually does his or her work. With the opportunities created by the ability to teach from anywhere come new challenges. Still, considering the wear and tear on adjuncts who travel to multiple campuses to teach, teaching remotely from home has a lot of appeal.
Five Quick Leads
University of Phoenix Online faculty application
http://www.phoenix.edu/faculty/become-a-faculty-member.html
Kaplan Online
http://www.kaplan.com/careersatkaplan/pages/kaplancareers.aspx
University of Illinois Online
Cardean University
(must register as a guest to get to the “Teaching Opportunities” page)
Saint Leo University
