Summary & review of Inside Higher Ed's "Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012"
June 21, 2012
"Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators, according to a new study by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group." Thus begins a fascinating article about faculty and administrator attitudes towards online learning.
This week I dove DEEP into the Horizon report about higher ed futures & the accompanying links to "further reading" articles...and was by turns fascinated, curious, excited & appalled by what I read. (See my first reactions here).
I'm still trying to synthesize some of my reactions to the report - there's SO MUCH in it. However, I was particularly curious about one idea in it that sent me looking for more information: the idea that higher ed faculty are very conflicted about the idea of online education. I have my own ambivalence about online teaching, and so I was really curious about how generalized these ideas/thoughts/prejudices were. This was reported in the 2012 Babson report, and I used Google to find the article above to explain this idea further (the entire Babson Report is like a small novel!)
So here's the data they found, after surveying thousands of faculty (3/4 of whom were "full-time" - a somewhat problematic term...does that mean tenured, tenure track, or contingent non-tenure track with 1-3 year contracts?)
- 58% of faculty said the future of online teaching filled them with more fear than excitement (while this number was *much* lower for faculty that actually teach online)
- 2/3 of all faculty responding said that they believed students learned less online than in a traditional classroom. (And 40% of online teachers also felt this way)
- "Asked whether their institutions were “pushing too much online,” nearly 30 percent of faculty respondents agreed, and another 30 percent declined to disagree, giving a neutral response. "
- Adjunct professors were more optimistic: 52% said they were more excited than fearful about online teaching, although, dismally, this may be because it allows them to pack even more teaching into their busy lives.
- There is significant concern about pay: "About 30 percent of faculty respondents believe their institutions pay fairly for online teaching, with 31 percent disagreeing and the rest remaining neutral."
- Interestingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly?!), administrators had a pretty different take on online education: " 80 percent said the online boom excited more than frightened them" and 79% disagreed that they were "pushing too much online"
- Completely unsurpisingly (to me) was this statement: "The greatest difference was on the subject of pay, with 58 percent of administrators submitting that their institutions compensate online instructors fairly (nearly twice as high as the proportion of instructors who believe this to be true)."
So....what do we have here?
A picture of a faculty and H. Ed. administration that is completely at odds with one another. You have administrators that are excited about online education, feel they are pushing for it in a positive way, and compensating instructors well. On the flip side, you have a majority of instructors that are fearful about online instruction, who strongly feel they are not being compensated fairly, and deeply, deeply believe that online instruction is inferior to face to face instruction. To quote the article:
“The level of concern about learning outcomes among faculty members is far greater than either the previously surveyed chief academic officers or the academic technology administrators,”
What's going on!?!?!?! This gap is particularly worrying to me because it seems likeadmin (decision-makers) are in a really different place than their faculty. My fear is that their enthusiasm could end up fueling decisions without getting the buy in (and hearing the concerns of) a reluctant faculty...ie the ones who will be tasked with implementing these initiatives. That is not a strategy for success.
For me, what I really longed for after reading this article was an answer to the question: why. I wanted a qualitative study to go along with the quantitative one. Why are faculty so reluctant? In the article they hazard guesses (3/4 of responses were from "full-time" faculty, who might have started teaching before the boom in online learning), but there are no voices from faculty OR administrators explaining their point of view. I think this would be a great follow-up, particularly given the constellation of answers given.
My driving questions are along these lines:
- Is it true that faculty are just irrationally tech-phobic fuddy-duddies, afraid to innovate in their teaching, who need a swift kick in the rear to get up to date (I fear that this is how administrators see us sometimes, or how we appear in these reports!)
- Is there actually a divide between long-career faculty & more recent entry faculty?
- How does pay, compensation & institutional support play into these issues?
- Are faculty's fears about the quality of online learning founded? What are the data about actual, real life, current-day learning outcomes, student retention & engagement in online vs. face to face courses in higher ed? (For example, it would be pretty easy to compare withdrawal & failure rates among both types of courses!)
- Faculty were cautiously optimistic about the potential for online learning...but what are we doing to realize that potential?!
Here's my take on it: 75% of current faculty are contingent, non-tenure track faculty. A lot of us are paid per course - that is, simply for the building, teaching & grading of students for one semester. Many of us hold several jobs, even working at several schools. Professional development funds are scarce, even benefits are hard to come by. In this climate, when the hell are we supposed to magically find time to become proficient/experts in new technology - especially if that time is unpaid?! The simple answer: it's inconceivable.
Institutional support for this process is probably variable. Where I work, I know some instructors receive support when they "go online" - less than 1 course's worth of pay to work with instructional designers, learn online pedagogy & develop a new course. (This can mean learning things like a new learning platform, multiple technologies, video production, etc. on top of the normal things we do: thinking about pedagogy, updating our content knowledge, etc. When I had my one foray intoonline teaching, I had none of this, neither the money nor the support.) After that, coaching & support is available - but completely unpaid. That learning has to take place on the faculty member's own dime.
What's more...who will be overseeing the quality of online courses in higher ed? As far as I know, the ID professionals are not gatekeepers at the moment - if an instructor is determined to teach an inferior online course, not following current best practices, I have no idea who would actually be reviewing that course...and who would have the power to tell the professor no. Reports from my students seem to indicate that while some professors at our university have well-built blended &online courses, other ones, in their words, "really suck."
So my question is: administrators are extremely enthusiastic about online teaching. I imagine they see it as both appealing to students AND cutting costs - a win win! But have they really thought about what it will take to provide quality online education? Have they thought about how much faculty support will be necessary - paid training, professional development, ongoing coaching as well as outcomes assessment? Or is this the reason for the dismal faculty reaction to our onlinefuture: we see it as an enormous amount of required, unpaid work leading to indifferent pedagogy and a lower quality of education for our students?
The real question is: administrators want to move into the future of higher ed - but are they willing to pay for it to actually work?
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