Adjuncts Become More Important [At least more widely used; but "get no respect"?]

"I get no respect"

#vwwt2000 PREDICTION #18 OF 20 from year 2000 
Adjuncts Become More Important

Adjunct faculty members, especially retirees from first careers, will continue to become a growing part of the teaching faculty at most colleges – both in classrooms and online. Support services for adjuncts will become more common and necessary. Part-time teaching may prove among the most attractive and self-respect-enhancing new retirement options.


See: Adjunct Faculty:  Conflicting Trends? More Part-Time Teachers vs. Delayed Retirements 1995-20??  

[UPDATE 2011:  STILL WAITING! 
I'm still waiting for the increases in support services for adjuncts commensurate with their numbers and the extent to which undergraduate programs rely on them.  I'm also still waiting for the "self-respect-enhancing new retirement options"! 

In year 2000, along with many others, I noticed the increasing role of part-time faculty in higher education instruction.  However, I did NOT anticipate the current economic recession and how it would press so many "senior" faculty members to delay their retirement and how that might change the balance of part-time and full-time teachers encountered by most undergraduate students.]

- 18th of 20 predictions from "A New Vision Worth Working Toward: Connected Education and Collaborative Change," Steven W. Gilbert, 2000-2006, First version published via AAHESGIT listserv January, 2000; PDF of full article

Adjunct Faculty: Conflicting Trends? More Part-Time Teachers vs. Delayed Retirements 1995-20??

Adjunct Faculty - Roles, Support

"...we see clearly the greatest decline in the full-time tenure-track faculty and the most significant growth in the part-time faculty." [1995-2007] -  "One Faculty Serving All Students;  An Issue Brief," by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, February, 2010  


 "almost a quarter of faculty members ages 50 to 70 who were saving for retirement expected to retire later than they had planned, with an average delay of three years."  Economy Slows Colleges' Ability to Hire and (Maybe) Retirements, Too By Kathryn Masterson July 25, 2010 - The Chronicle of Higher Education:


"Less Than 1/3 Higher Ed Teachers Full-Time Tenure-Track in 2007...
almost three-fifths of the teaching corps in higher education taught part-time in 2007—58.5% in all institutions (55.9% in four-year institutions)... full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members made up only 25.1% (27.5% in four-year institutions). 
Thus close to 75% of the instructional workforce was made up of non-tenure-track faculty members and graduate employees in 2007...
Furthermore, looking at the changes in these categories since 1995, we see clearly the greatest decline in the full-time tenure-track faculty and the most significant growth in the part-time faculty. 
Excluding graduate student TAs, in 2007 less than one-third of all faculty members—31.1%—were professors in full-time tenured or tenure-track positions, compared with 42.3% in 1995 ... In four-year institutions the figure is 36.7%, compared with 51.3% in 1995"

- Excerpts from "One Faculty Serving All Students;  An Issue Brief," by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, February, 2010  

Flexible Space/Schedule Still High Priorities for Higher Ed?

Vs. Overload, Career Risks, Financial Fears? #vwwt2000 Predctn10
PREDICTION #10 OF 20 from year 2000
Still likely?
More colleges and universities will recognize the need to plan for and institutionalize a process for change, and to accept the increased risk of failure along with the exciting prospects of new success. This attitude may be instigated by, but not limited to, the increasing importance and more widespread use of information technology in teaching, learning, and research. To institutionalize change, colleges and universities will:

• Develop new administrative units to support changes in teaching and learning. 
• Provide incentives and reduce obstacles for faculty members to take risks in trying to find, develop, and use combinations of technology, pedagogy, and content. 
• Make it easier for faculty, students, and academic support professionals to reconfigure their schedules and the spaces in which they work together. 
• Do so by making flexibility a high priority when retrofitting classrooms, renovating old buildings or designing new ones, and modifying the system for scheduling course activities.

[In year 2000 I didn't anticipate the extent of the shifts in workload (more for fulltime tenure-track faculty;  more use of adjuncts) and the leap in complexity of providing guidance and support for faculty and students who have so many tech options OUTSIDE the control of the college or university by 2011. - Steve Gilbert June, 2011]
- 10th of 20 predictions from "A New Vision Worth Working Toward: Connected Education and Collaborative Change," Steven W. Gilbert, 2000-2006, First version published via AAHESGIT listserv January, 2000; PDF of full article

F. Organizing to Improve Teaching and Learning with Technology: Collaborative Change

How do we organize the process of improving teaching and learning (with technology)?

At most institutions, the context is a sharp division of labor. The most important divisions:

• Individual faculty exercise relatively personal, private control over the content and methods of each course. (In most departments, this individual ownership of individual courses is far more meaningful than any collective faculty responsibility for the degree program.)
  
• Various facilities, resources and services are controlled by various staff units (e.g., classrooms, course management systems, libraries, study areas and their equipment) and by outside organizations (e.g., Internet sites, Google tools, textbooks, ...)

The implication: each can handle those responsibilities relatively independently of the others. Presumably, the sum of their efforts will yield sufficient return on the institution's investment in expensive technologies such as course management systems, classrooms, and libraries. Many of us had hoped for much more: computing would revolutionize how students learn, what they learn, and who can learn. Perhaps the cost structure of education would be transformed, too. Or maybe not. That division of responsibility has been a major roadblock. Of course, we occasionally overcome that division. I have already talked about how a variety of independent choices by faculty led to a coherent pattern of change in learning activities and outcomes at Reed College in the 1980s. Here's an example of an unusual degree of collaboration. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that this story unfolds at an entrepreneurial research university where team research is the norm. A few years ago, my old undergraduate department, the MIT Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, decided that major curricular change was needed. Faculty started by asking what skills their graduating students would need. To develop those skills, faculty decided, students would need plenty of practice in four activities:

1. the conceptual work of design,
   
2. converting those ideas into plans for something that could be built,
   
3. actually constructing the engineered work, and
   
4. testing the product.

Faculty called this four step cycle “Conceive – Develop – Implement – Operate (CDIO)”. And they realized that most of CDIO needed to occur outside classrooms, 24 x 7. Conceiving such a reform is one thing. To actually develop, implement and operate such an innovative academic program would require collaboration involving many faculty in the department along with many individuals and groups outside the department. For example, faculty realized that their building (which was due for renovation) was unsuitable for this kind of 24x7 approach. When the institution's architects balked at planning such a facility, the department responded that it would raise its own money and hire its own architects. (One advantage to having a faculty with a track record of raising large sums of money and well-to-do alumni– it changes the internal balance of power!) 'Support staff' and faculty from other departments and offices then teamed to develop these plans, e.g., figuring out how, in order to work on their projects, engineering undergraduates could use keyless access to enter otherwise-locked rooms in the building at any hour of the day or night. That MIT success story is the product of a coalition of effort, complementing a division of responsibility. How are things going at your institution? Who takes responsibility for improving teaching and learning with technology? Do those folks have the respect and budget to carry out that responsibility? For example, how does (or might) your institution deal with questions such as these:

1. Should your institution switch to Google Mail? What are the educational, budget, and policy implications of relying on such an external service?
   
2. The monograph and article no longer have a monopoly on academic expression. More work in the disciplines is being developed and shared through web sites, video, email, and multimedia. In each department, what media do your advanced students need to use to do their projects and communicate professionally? To prepare for that, what kinds of multimedia skills should your entering students learn in the first year ? Who should help them acquire those skills in the first year? How do you assess those skills?
   
3. What issues of policy and practice are emerging as a result of ePortfolio use at our institution? Should projects and the portfolios themselves should become part of the student's formal academic record? How long should they be saved? Who has the right to change those records?
   
4. Much of what faculty do to improve their teaching is the result of informal learning. How can such learning be improved and extended? What roles might other staff (e.g. librarians) play in helping faculty learn about teaching and learning with technology in their disciplines at other institutions?

“It takes a village.” Steve Gilbert and I have been supporting collaborative change for fifteen years. Here are just two of the ideas and resources we've developed at The TLT Group:

1. Your institution has what we would call a Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable if you have a council or conclave that meets regularly, advises the chief academic officer on issues of policy relating to teaching and learning with technology, and convenes many kinds of stakeholders. To assure that the Roundtable balances a variety of points of view, it's important to include faculty (tenure track and adjunct) who represent a variety of degrees and types of technology use, for example. TLTRs have advised on budgets and tricky policy questions. They can help faculty and support staff to understand one another's perspectives. And they can accelerate the sharing of information between junior faculty and senior technology administrators, senior librarians and junior facilities staff, student affairs staff and academic department heads, as TLTR members from all these areas work together to develop a policy position for the institution. A well-functioning TLTR helps the institution seize opportunities and deal with problems that are not the responsibility of any one office, department or segment of the institution. We can help with getting a TLTR underway and providing resources for its agenda.
   
2. Gathering information from stakeholders: Flashlight Online, our web-based survey system, has been used by a few institutions to regularly gather input from different segments of the academic community. Sandy Shugart, president of Valencia Community College, has said that Flashlight Online is one of the keys to their strategy for shared governance. Tenure track and adjunct faculty are regularly surveyed so that they can contribute information, ideas and opinions for use in developing new policy at Valencia.

What steps has your institution taken to exercise collaborative responsibility for improving teaching and learning with technology? What do you suggest as next steps? Click on the word “COMMENTS” below, just to the right of my name, to share your observations and suggestions. REFERENCES For a bit more on the history of CDIO at MIT, see William Litant's article, “Learning in a Landmark Laboratory,” in http://bit.ly/MIT-CDIO.

Using Flashlight Online as a Tool for Shared Governance and Community Engagement

“Flashlight Online is one of the four or five most important collaborative technologies we use at the College,” Sandy Shugart told me. He’s President of Valencia Community College, one of the biggest users of our web-based survey system. President Shugart went on to say that Valencia’s Faculty Council frequently solicits feedback and opinions from all faculty (and he stressed the importance of including adjuncts) on policy questions. Flashlight Online, he told me, was a key way of keeping all faculty involved in shared governance.

You can understand why this was great for us to hear. Most of the ways The TLT Group serves subscribers involve helping people collaborate with one another: in improving faculty support, assessment, planning, learning space design, meditating ‘dangerous discussions,’ etc.. Flashlight Online is a web-based system shared by about a hundred subscribing institutions. It’s easy for authors from different institutions to see one another’s surveys, use one another’s items, co-author surveys, analyze data together. (Of course, authors can also keep a survey and data private, if they choose.) Previously we’d thought of Flashlight supporting collaboration by helping survey authors work together. So President Shugart’s observation was a delightful new way to see Flashlight Online.

At that moment, I realized I’d already seen another, quite different example at Valencia of using Flashlight Online to promote democracy, shared governance and collaboration. As we’ve already described in our blog, Prof. Pat Nellis has developed a Flashlight Online survey for students to vote on class rules. Pat uses public debate and secret ballots to help assure that, if there’s a rule, students follow it. This kind of practice teaches students about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy in ways that go beyond what high school civics can teach. (Click here to see a Nellis survey.)

At other institutions, Flashlight Online has already been used in a faculty union election and other forms of voting.

We can imagine using Flashlight Online as a tool to engage a whole institution's worth of students (including commuting students and 'distant learners') in governance. On what questions of policy and practice would be useful to uncover student preferences, opinions, and activities? On questions where the institution could use student input, work with student government and make it a regular practice to
a) ask students, then
b) report back to students about how their input has reshaped policy, services, etc.
Over time, I predict you'll see an increase in response rates to your surveys, student involvement, student identification with the university, and perhaps even, over the long haul, alumni giving. Over time, I predict you'll see an increase in response rates to your surveys, student involvement, student identification with the university, and perhaps even, over the long haul, alumni giving. (I admit I'm an optimist, but I believe that if you ask people questions whose answers are important to them, they'll invest a bit of themselves in responding.)

Is anyone at your institution using Flashlight Online or some other survey tool to support collaboration, shared governance, or voting? Want to know more about any of the cases mentioned above? Please let us know by posing a comment on this blog or emailing me.