|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Being Online
They’re mixing face-to-face teaching, instructional TV, and online education at this community college.
By Sharon Joy Ng Hale
Online education is particularly well suited to the needs of community college students. Although community colleges have lower per-unit fees than four-year colleges and universities, many community college students still experience economic hardship. Even with fee waivers, students may have problems finding the money for textbooks, transportation, or day care. Community college students also often have family responsibilities that tie them to their homes. Online learning helps ease some of these problems by eliminating the need for students to be physically present on campus and by providing a more flexible format for achieving educational goals. Emphasizing online learning raises a series of potential problems for community colleges, but it can also offer many benefits. The Yuba Community College District in California has taken the lead in offering an online educational program to students. As a result, our faculty union has established provisions in our contract that ensure that the rights and working conditions of online faculty are preserved. Here is how our district is doing it.
Context The changing demographics of the community college student population in California have presented challenges for educators. Half of all California community college students are between seventeen and twenty-two years of age, and two out of five are over twenty-five. Although the senior citizen population in the state is doubling, enrollment of older students is dropping. Forty percent of the state’s community college students are white, 30 percent are Latino, 15 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander, 8 percent are African American, and less than 5 percent are Native American. These numbers are expected to change in the coming years as a result of predicted growth in the Latino population.
Most community college students in California have a high school diploma, but a substantial number do not. Fifty percent drop out after the first year of college, and less than one-tenth earn an associate’s degree. Only about 25 percent of those who take transfer courses eventually transfer to a four-year college or university. Low rates of transfer and degree completion are especially problematic for Latinos, African Americans, older students, and students without a high school diploma.
The California community college system must develop strategies that address the needs of the state’s diverse and changing population. More than half of the state’s incoming community college students will need training in basic skills in math and English. Because community college programs are the largest provider of workforce training in the state, they must develop curricula that not only meet the transfer requirements of four-year colleges and universities, but also align with state and local workforce development needs. California is attempting to meet these needs in various ways that include an expanded use of online and hybrid distance education courses.
Yuba College, the only California community college whose faculty association is an affiliate of the AAUP and is part of the Collective Bargaining Congress, was one of the first community colleges in the state to start a program in online learning. Informed by the policies and standards outlined in AAUP Policy Documents and Reports and, especially, the 1999 Statement on Distance Education, Yuba has incorporated a strong online learning program within an existing distance education program known as distributive education.
Negotiators were able to add strong statements to the faculty union contract that protect faculty in such areas as intellectual property rights, working conditions, workload, and compensation. At Yuba, class size and contract load are limited, faculty are not required to teach online unless they desire to do so, and tenured faculty have first rights for developing and teaching distance education courses.
The distributive education program at Yuba has proven to be an important source of enrollments within the district and has simultaneously provided a viable way for faculty to reach many students who might not otherwise attend college. It has also allowed faculty to test their creativity by developing online curricula that effectively engage students without sacrificing quality.
Online Learning Online students must be self-motivated, organized, and task-oriented to succeed. Those who are succeed at achieving the necessary curricular goals while also contributing positively to the online environment. Some instructors have commented that they get to know their online students better than they do those in the traditional classroom. Shy students who are often reluctant to speak out in a traditional classroom can excel in the virtual classroom because they feel more comfortable sharing their ideas online. Additionally, being online gives students the opportunity to reflect upon their answers before participating in discussions, which increases the likelihood that their comments will be focused and on target.
By offering classes that vary from the traditional eighteen-week format, Yuba gives students more choices for completing their educational goals. More than twenty-five courses are currently taught in a nine-week format through distributive education. This gives students who drop a course before the end of the first nine-week period an opportunity to complete the course in the same semester by enrolling in it again in the nine-week period that follows.
Other online courses are taught in alternative formats. For example, Yuba offers short, one-unit courses every six weeks throughout the semester. Some of these courses are offered two or three times each semester. There are also one-unit, six-week modules that, when combined, allow students to complete three units in a given subject in a more flexible format.
Online courses have grown phenomenally in the Yuba Community College District since their introduction in fall 2000. Eight online courses appeared in the class schedule that fall, but by fall 2006, eighty-four online courses were being offered. Enrollments, meanwhile, grew from 159 students to 2,519 students during those six years. By spring 2007, online enrollments had increased to3,114. As a result, overall full-time-equivalent student enrollment across the district has grown, and much of that growth is attributed to online class enrollments. This trend is expected to continue.
As distributive education courses and online learning grow, curricular challenges have come to the forefront. Overall attrition rates in online courses have steadily declined, falling from 35 percent in fall 2000 to about 24 percent in fall 2006. Retention rates for the same period have averaged about 52 percent. A subcommittee of the college’s curriculum committee is currently developing ways to evaluate online classes and compare attrition and retention rates with those in the traditional classroom. This subcommittee is also developing an evaluation process and criteria to measure the quality and effectiveness of online courses offered in the district.
The overall effectiveness of the district’s online program is also being considered. Evaluation standards are being developed by the subcommittee that will address the following questions:
- Does the necessary infrastructure (for example, bandwidth) exist to deliver the courses to the students? (This is important for instructors who want to use videos from the Internet.)
- Is there adequate training for faculty who want to teach on line? Is there adequate ongoing training for those who already teach online?
- Does the necessary support staff exist to assist faculty?
- Is the student help desk equipped to meet the needs of students en rolled in online courses?
As it forges ahead with the online program, Yuba is using innovative strategies to increase the types of distributive education classes being offered in the district. By combining different distributive education delivery modalities, instructors can offer more types of classes. In one model, traditional instructional TV lectures are being archived and then video streamed and managed online through WebCT. Most instructors choose to write their lectures and then upload them for students to read as part of the day’s lesson, but by combining these different modalities, instructors can have face-to-face students, online students, and an instructional TV audience enrolled in a single course. Interfacing the live lectures with the online environment also gives students the opportunity to see their teacher live and in action.
Labor Politics How has online education changed the labor politics at Yuba College? What were the specific safeguards necessary to protect faculty who chose to teach online? Are tenured faculty being displaced by adjuncts in the online world? Yuba College has a strong faculty union that has attempted to address these issues. Overall, the union has been successful in safeguarding faculty rights.
A historical perspective regarding the development of contract provisions that addressed online learning is instructive. In the first contract that followed the implementation of online courses, faculty negotiators addressed the problem of class caps for online courses. Because classroom size doesn’t limit the number of students who can conceivably enroll in online courses, protections have been necessary to prevent exploitation of faculty. Additionally, without reasonable class caps, high enrollments in online courses can have a negative impact on face-to-face enrollments. The resulting contract set class caps for online courses at thirty students. When student enrollments warranted increasing the class caps, faculty could choose to increase the original cap but were not required to do so. Increases in original class caps occurred in increments of twenty slots. A modest stipend accompanied these increases with an additional stipend for another added block of twenty slots. Any increases beyond forty slots, however, resulted in a limited capped stipend. The stipends represented an acknowledgment by the academy that those teaching distance education should be compensated equally for equal work.
By the next contract, however, Yuba College faculty voted to end the stipends for online professors who added twenty slot increments to their cap. The stipends for online faculty had created a feeling of inequity because no stipends were granted for faculty who added students to their in class courses. Although online instruction requires more work than traditional classes, the stipends were considered negotiable, and thus, with the current contract, those stipends ended. Without compensation for the additional work required to manage additional students in the online environment, some online faculty were reluctant to add more students above the cap.
Other provisions from the earlier contract continued. Our contract states that no faculty member is required to teach online. When one chooses to do so, only 40 percent of the normal workload can be online, although additional online courses can be taught for extra pay. At our college, this means that faculty members who teach online are still teaching at least nine units in the classroom.
There is little concern that adjuncts teaching online courses will replace tenured or fulltime faculty. Senior faculty are given the “first right of refusal” to develop and implement new online courses. The faculty member teaching the course maintains intellectual property rights over the material. Responsibility for course development remains with the faculty member just as it would in the classroom. Currently, class caps for online courses are still generally lower than face-to-face classes and are determined in a consultative process between the concerned faculty member and the supervising dean.
An emerging challenge facing faculty is the Yuba Community College District’s move toward becoming a multi-campus district. Currently, Yuba College is the only fully accredited campus in the district, but one of Yuba’s satellite campuses, Woodland Community College, will soon become an autonomous institution. The district must determine how to manage a distance education program across two campuses. Whatever curricular decisions the district makes, ensuring fair and equitable treatment for faculty who teach online will continue to be a priority for the faculty association.
Sharon Joy Ng Hale is a psychology professor at Woodland Community College in the Yuba Community College District in California. She is past president of the California AAUP conference, has served two terms as the District I representative on the AAUP’s governing Council, and was a Council executive committee member for two years. She currently teaches both online and in the traditional classroom. Her e-mail address is sng@yccd.edu.
Comment on this article.
|