Computer Crash: Academic Freedom Collides with On-line Automation
by Evelyn Beck
Adjuncts are at the heart of a battle brewing on American campuses about academic freedom in on-line teaching.
It is becoming increasingly apparent to many that distance education courses which have been designed in whole or in part by full-time faculty are being turned over to part-time instructors who are expected to teach the same course in the same way. This is sure to open up additional opportunities for those seeking adjunct on-line positions. However, full-timers see a myriad of threats in this trend. In addition, it raises questions about academic freedom for faculty at every level.
The reason behind the growing use of adjuncts to teach on-line courses is the same as the reason why adjuncts already teach such a high percentage of college courses: money. With adjunct salaries significantly lower than those of full-time instructors, using adjuncts in distance education programs is, to a large extent, just another economy in the escalating costs of higher education. Despite a decade-long sales pitch from institutions to students that on-line classes are the same as traditional classes—only more convenient—there do exist differences that have faculty concerned.
One such distinction is the growing use of automated functions in on-line courses. Carol Twigg, Executive Director of the Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in an article titled “Who Owns On-line Courses and Course Materials? Intellectual Property Policies for a New Learning Environment,” calls this the “player piano scenario.” The concern, she writes, is that “Once faculty put their course material on-line, the knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material [are] taken out of their possession, transferred to the machinery and placed in the hands of the administration. . . . Most important, once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required.”
She cites the opinions of many professors who believe that personal interaction between instructor and student is too vital to be dismissed. She also gives examples of how software is taking over such faculty functions as grading and, while not yet pushing the instructor out of the picture entirely, is already enabling a single instructor to facilitate a class with three times the normal number of students.
Jack Simmons, a professor at Savannah State University in Savannah, Georgia in “The Future of Academic Freedom: Educational Technology and Academic Freedom,” sees the future this way: “Asynchronous distance learning allows for maximal standardization by replacing a department with a couple of on-line course developers and a handful of adjuncts or facilitators to grade papers and exams.”
This is exactly the scenario that outraged officials at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) when Jones International University was accredited in 1999 by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Jones offers on-line courses and degrees exclusively. The AAUP cited the fact that with only two-full time faculty and 36 course offerings, Jones relies predominantly on adjuncts. The AAUP also charged that “this institution’s program consists of pre-packaged courses designed by ‘content experts’ and delivered for others. How is academic freedom—for either students or faculty—preserved?”
This standardization raises questions about the faculty member’s role in teaching an on-line course. It has become common at campuses to use a system-wide template to design courses with a standard look. This approach streamlines the course design process, and is obviously a benefit to students enrolled in different on-line classes at the same institution. However, with this standardization comes a demand for a greater uniformity in teaching methods than has ever been required in the traditional classroom. At my institution, for instance, a fellow instructor who took over teaching one of my on-line literature courses was told that she was allowed to change a few of the readings I had selected, but not the nature of the essay assignments. In contrast, such differences among instructors teaching different sections of the same face-to-face class are common and encouraged in the name of diversity and excellence. (Imagine a teaching award given for presenting material the same way it’s done by everyone else!) And instructors have long viewed such diversity as a right guaranteed by the principle of academic freedom.
The nature of academic freedom in the new millennium was addressed by the AAUP in its 1999 Statement of Distance Education: “Teachers should have the same responsibility for selecting and presenting materials in courses offered through distance-education technologies as they have in those offered in traditional classroom settings.”
Full- and part-time faculty alike remain worried that today’s administrators have no patience for such idealistic—some might say outmoded—thinking in an environment where the pressures to cut costs are eased by the opportunities for automation wrought by new technologies.
