Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

One of the biggest changes to universities in North America over the last twenty years has been the growth of non-tenured teaching faculty in universities. An explosion in undergraduate enrolments across Canada – 400,000 more students from 2002 to 2012 – has come without a corresponding increase in tenure-track faculty. While the number of instructors doubled between the 1980s and 2006, there was a decline of 10 percentage in tenure and tenure-track faculty (Chiose, 2015). The position is, if anything, even more, dramatic in the USA, where universities and colleges were much harder hit by the economic crisis in 2008 than their Canadian counterparts.

In an article in Canada’s leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail, Simona Chiose wrote (2018):

Canadian universities say they can no longer afford to deliver higher education through tenured academics who may spend more than a third of their time engaged in research. Instead, most universities have decided that, to staff their classrooms at a reasonable cost, they must turn, in varying degrees, to contract instructors and teaching-track faculty.

Contract staff such as adjuncts or sessionals usually have either a doctoral degree in the subject area or strongly related work experience for more vocational subjects. In Canada, the union representing contract instructors (CUPE) is fighting to get multiyear contracts for sessional instructors who now have to reapply each year for their jobs. Ideally, the union would like universities to give sessional instructors priority for teaching-track jobs, which do not have tenure but have more job security than contract positions. With job security can come opportunities for training in teaching.

However, an even more alarming development in recent years has been an increasing tendency to use post-graduate students as teaching assistants, often responsible for delivering lectures to 200 students or more in first and second-year courses. This model is also being increasingly used where institutions are moving to a hybrid model, combining both online and face-to-face components, especially where the former very large lecture-based course is being redesigned for hybrid learning. Even including the TAs, the instructor/student ratio is often 1:100 or higher for these large enrollment courses. There is usually no additional training for TAs about how to teach online, although in many – but by no means all – cases, they do get some kind of training in teaching face-to-face.

With fully online courses, though, a different model has often been used where the instructor: student ratio has been deliberately targeted at under 40 for undergraduate courses, and under 30 for graduate courses. Scaling up has been handled by hiring additional part-time adjunct or associate professors on contract. The adjuncts would be paid to take a short online briefing course on teaching online which sets out the expectations for online teaching. This was an affordable model because the additional student tuition fees would more than cover the cost of hiring additional contract instructors, once the course was developed (Bates and Poole, 2003).

However, this has been possible because most of such online courses have been aimed mainly at a higher level undergraduate students or graduate students. With both blended and online courses now being targeted at large first and second-year classes, new models are being developed that may not have the same level of quality as the ‘best practice’ online courses. This is a particularly difficult issue for several reasons:

• Practices both for dealing with large face-to-face classes and with online classes vary considerably within each form of delivery, and from one institution to another, so making generalizations is fraught with danger
• Decisions about whether to use teaching assistants or part-time, contract instructors, are driven more by financial considerations than by best pedagogical practice
• There are other factors at work besides money and pedagogy in the use of teaching assistants and adjunct faculty, such as the desire to provide financial support to international and graduate students, the idea of apprenticeship in teaching, and the supply and demand effects on the employment of doctoral graduates seeking a career in university teaching and research
• There is no golden mean for instructor/student ratios in either blended or online learning. In the mainly quantitative/STEM subjects, much higher ratios are sustainable without the loss of quality, through the use of automated marking and feedback, for the theory component, while the practical component requires much lower ratios due to the need to share equipment and monitor students
• MOOCs are (wrongly) giving the impression that it is possible to scale up even credit-based online learning at a lower cost, by eliminating learning support provided by tenured faculty

Despite these caveats, there is a genuine concern that the over-reliance on teaching assistants for online and blended courses will have three negative consequences for both students and online learning in general:

• As with the large face-to-face classes, the pedagogy for online or blended courses will resort more to information transmission, due to the TAs’ lack of training and experience in teaching online;
• For the online or hybrid courses, student drop-out, and dissatisfaction will increase because, especially in first and second year teaching, they will not get the learning the support they need when studying online. As a result, faculty and students will claim that hybrid or fully online learning is inferior to classroom-based instruction;
• Faculty and especially faculty unions will see online learning and blended learning being used by administrations to cut costs and overtime to reduce the employment of tenured faculty, and will, therefore, try to block its implementation.

Why can’t TAs provide the support needed online if they can do this for face-to-face classes? First, it is arguable whether they do provide adequate support for students in large first-year classes, but in online courses in subject domains where discussion is important, where qualitative judgments and decisions have to be made by students and instructors, where knowledge needs to be developed and structured, in other words in any field where the learning requires more than the transmission and repetition of information, then students need to be able to interact with an instructor that has a deep understanding of the subject area. Thus there are good reasons to hire adjunct faculty (as usually, they already have post-graduate qualifications) to teach online or in blended formats, but not TAs in general (although there will always be exceptions).