A new breed of teachers Universities seek more online part-timers

In: International Herald Tribune, Special Report p 16

By Joseph Rosenbloom (IHT)

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

NEWTON, Massachusetts:

The early-morning sky was turning from black to metallic blue outside Nancy Waldron's office window at Lasell College in this Boston suburb when she sat down at her desktop computer.

Waldron, an assistant professor of business and management, is teaching five courses this semester at Lasell. She was at her desk before dawn on a frigid Wednesday recently.

But her early-bird work wasn't for Lasell, which operates under a not-for-profit charter and provides classrooms for the instruction of its 1,000 students on its tree-studded campus. First, Waldron had some online teaching to do for three other employers: Kaplan College, which is based in New York City, Baker College, in Detroit, and Cardean University in Deerfield, Illinois.

"If you don't check in all the time, you can get backed up really quickly," Waldron said. Waldron, 41, exemplifies a new breed: teachers who work online part-time for for-profit universities. That job description scarcely existed five years ago, but today it is a fast-growing feature of higher education.

"There's this hidden, but rapidly emerging group of people who can put together a solid income stream by teaching at one or more institutions," notes Michael Offerman, president of Capella University.

Capella, which is located in Minneapolis, is a for-profit online university specializing in graduate-level courses. There are 30 such U.S. schools that grant degrees in fields ranging from law to nursing, cater to 150,000 students at any one time and generate annual sales of $900 million, according to Eduventures Inc., a Boston-based research and consulting company.

The for-profit schools have tapped into a market of working adults who are embracing Internet-based courses as a convenient way to pursue a university degree. And the trend is translating into opportunity for a pool of teachers - estimated to number 10,000, the vast majority part-timers - on whom the schools rely. The largest of the schools is the University of Phoenix, which employs more than 7,000 part-time faculty members to teach its 50,000 online students (out of a total enrollment of 135,000).

On the five weekdays that Waldron teaches at Lasell, she is at her desk by 6:30 a.m. She typically devotes the first hour of her day to cyberspace duty on behalf of her for-profit employers. Then she switches gears to work face-to-face with students and colleagues at Lasell. "It's like two different worlds," she said.

Except for a one-hour seminar on Tuesday nights, which Waldron teaches online as part of a Kaplan course on small-business management, her work for the three for-profit schools is - in Internet lingo - asynchronous. That is, she doesn't have to be online at the same time as her students. Whenever she can snatch a free moment, she attends to such tasks as offering feedback to her students on discussion sites for each class and answering their questions.

The pace can be hectic. Waldron sticks to a rigorous schedule of replying to her students' emails within 24 hours of receiving them. The work can pile up day or night since her students live in many time zones, some in foreign countries.

"Usually, I come home at 4:30 or 5 o'clock," said Waldron. "Then I'll say, 'I'll work till eight. Then I'll shut off the computer.'" She is back at the computer on Saturday mornings. Sundays she pretty much takes off, although she does check her email on that day, too.

The tempo is typical of online teaching, concludes a recent report by the Washington-based American Council on Education. Teaching an online course requires "far more time and energy from faculty than traditional courses," according to the report, entitled "Barriers to Distance Education."

However, it does not pay handsomely. Waldron, for example, earns only $1,500 to $2,500 for each two-month course she teaches, in which at least a dozen students are normally enrolled.

The for-profit schools rarely extend benefits, such as health insurance and retirement plans, to part-time employees. Nor is there any assurance of work beyond the end of a contract. Contracts are awarded one course at a time. Tenure, that guarantor of permanent work and academic freedom at traditional universities, is unknown.

Still, officials at the for-profit schools say they have no trouble recruiting part-time teachers. Take Oliver Schwabe, who lives in a small wine-producing town near Frankfurt, Germany. Schwabe, 36, teaches courses in knowledge and business management for six online universities and runs his own consulting company.

"I spend a lot of time with my family and can not only bring my daughters to their kindergarten around the corner every morning, but can also shuttle them around to various activities," he said. "I then wait in the car while I am working on my wireless laptop."

The motivation is different for Carl Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics and a professor at the University of Colorado. Wieman has been working part-time for Jones International University, based in Englewood, Colorado, to develop an online physics course. "It seemed to me that there was a different way of presenting the material here," Wieman said. "I wanted to go beyond what we could do in a classroom and see if we could teach with online simulations of the real world."

Joseph Rosenbloom is a free-lance journalist based in Boston.