How to Retain Online Instructors

March 13, 2009

By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning Administration

There are many benefits of employing part-time instructors to teach online: they can relieve the instructional workload of full-time faculty; they can provide expertise that is not available within a program; and they can help keep program costs manageable. Along with these potential benefits, relying on part-time online adjuncts creates new challenges, including high rates of instructor turnover.

When an online learning program relies heavily on part-time instructors, a high turnover rate could negatively affect course quality and increase faculty development costs. This is why retaining good part-time online instructors is a priority at Humber College’s Open Learning Centre in Toronto, where 90 percent of online courses are taught by part-time instructors.

Ruth Hickey, director of the Open Learning Centre, provides centralized support for online instructors in an otherwise decentralized institution. Hickey works with academic program coordinators to identify which courses will be offered online.

Hickey encourages each department to identify its online faculty as early as possible, which enables the Open Learning Centre to begin working with these instructors before the term begins.

“I send out a welcome letter to each online instructor, reminding them of the services that we have in the Open Learning Centre that can make this teaching experience positive for them because in a lot of cases, online faculty feel that the focus is on making sure that the student is happy and that no one is really there for them,” Hickey says.

Each online instructor is assigned a specific staff member (according to academic area), which provides a single point of contact for each instructor.

“There’s a lot of work involved with teaching online. That’s the hardest part in retaining faculty—the fact that initially it looks like you’re not getting paid for what you do because you spend so much time fumbling around with the technology,” Hickey says.

The goal of the Open Learning Centre is to support faculty and provide the services needed to allow them to “focus on the content and teaching their online courses so they don’t have to deal with the nitty-gritty technical support for the students, such as navigation.” Hickey says. “I think by providing that type of service, the faculty aren’t so overwhelmed.

“Teaching online is very time consuming and if you add that component to delivering the content, you’re basically doubling their workload, and who wants to work with an organization when their workload has doubled, and they’re not being compensated for it? … Ultimately, in order to retain the faculty, we’re trying to make the experience less frustrating and as positive as possible for them with limited resources,” Hickey says.

A faculty community
Like students in an online course, when instructors feel like they are part of a community, they will likely stick around, Hickey says. To create a sense of community, the Open Learning Centre invites part-time online instructors to campus events such as course showcases and faculty development opportunities. (Most of the part-time online live near the Humber’s Toronto campus.)

An important part of creating this sense of community as well as improving instructors’ technology skills is the WebCT clinic the Open Learning Centre offers. After completing this clinic—Hickey recommends that all online instructors complete it before teaching online—instructors can take part in an ongoing threaded discussion about online teaching techniques with other instructors who have completed the clinic. “We try to build a sense of community [online], realizing that they’re not necessarily on campus a whole lot. You have to utilize the technology in terms of building that sense of community the same way you do in your online classroom,” Hickey says.

Excerpted from Giving Part-Time Online Instructors What They Need, Distance Education Report, December 15, 2005.