Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

15.3. The Elephant in the Room

However, the discussion about the use of adjuncts and TAs masks a more significant issue. There are two factors that lead to the very large class sizes in first and second year that faculty and their unions really don’t want to talk about:

• The starvation of first and second-year students of teaching resources; senior faculty concentrate more on upper-level courses, and want to keep these class sizes smaller. As a consequence first and second-year students suffer.
• Teaching subsidizes research: too often tuition revenues get filtered off into supporting research activities. The most obvious case is that if teachers spent more time teaching and less doing research, there would be more faculty available for teaching. Teaching loads for experienced, tenured faculty are often quite light and as stated above, focused on the small upper level classes. A report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (Jonker and Hicks, 2014) suggested that if professors whom it has classified as laggards in research doubled their teaching time, it would be the equivalent of adding 1,500 faculty members across the province, enough to staff an additional mid-sized university.