Are They Worth It?

Since 2011, the trend of digital badging has continued to rise among various organizations, including higher education. After gathering faculty feedback, input, ideas, and perspectives on structure and implementation, the faculty development center at a Midwestern university launched a university-wide digital badging program. The intent was to incorporate faculty input into the design of digital badges to gain faculty engagement. After the first year of implementation, a survey of faculty perceptions on digital badging received unanticipated results. Emerging themes from this survey indicate that faculty are hesitant towards digital badging; however, participant responses also suggest that faculty uncertainty of the digital badging program is connected to the communication process. Recommendations are presented to support the needs of faculty perceptions of a digital badging program.

Holistic Evaluation Strategies to Empower Remote Adjunct Faculty

To ensure a quality educational experience for students, it is important to establish effective evaluation strategies to support remote adjunct faculty. Adapting a comprehensive process of training, mentoring, evaluating, and providing ongoing support strategies and professional development opportunities builds a foundation for faculty success. Implementing scalable strategies for holistic evaluation offers opportunities to further support adjunct faculty teaching online. This chapter will share effective evaluation practices that provide purposeful strategies to empower adjunct faculty to strengthen skills and ultimately support student success as well as learning in the classroom.

Key Performance Indicator Dashboards

Growing enrollments in online learning have dramatically increased the number of remote, adjunct faculty teaching online. This is a challenge for universities to create scalable strategies to develop, evaluate, and support faculty in the online classroom. While robust qualitative and quantitative faculty performance metrics exist, faculty analytic data is typically difficult to retrieve and even more difficult to efficiently analyze. This chapter overviews the value of key performance indicator dashboards (KPI) that can help automate the collection and use of faculty analytic data to enhance faculty development and, ultimately, foster positive student learning experiences.

It Is Not About the Money

This chapter will discuss the motivation of remote adjunct faculty members by utilizing the theoretical framework of self-determination theory. This will assist institutions in understanding why these faculty members teach, and understanding their motivation will assist institutions in recruiting, hiring, developing, and retaining qualified remote adjunct faculty members. As online programs in higher education continue to grow, there is a persistent increase in the usage of remote adjunct faculty. If an organization has strong, qualified adjunct faculty members but does not take care of them, the adjunct faculty member will go elsewhere to teach. People typically make job decisions based on money, but job retention decisions typically rest on autonomy and culture. With the growth in the number of adjunct faculty members, universities may be challenged to find qualified instructors, which makes retention even more critical.

Support for Adjunct Faculty Scholarship in Online Graduate Programs

Faculty scholarship is an invaluable contribution to the richness of academic culture, teaching quality, innovation, student learning, and the development of graduate programs. The growing number of adjunct faculty teaching in online graduate programs demands that increased attention be paid to institutional initiatives designed to effectively support research for this population. This chapter is an overview of the opportunities to support remote, adjunct faculty research in graduate programs by enhancing research knowledge, fostering research collaboration, and motivating engagement in research.

Holistic Evaluation and Support of Remote, Adjunct Faculty

Remote, adjunct faculty are becoming a large population for many institutions as online learning continues to grow. Because of the growth in this population of instructors, traditional means of evaluating faculty may not be efficient or scalable. Learning management systems (LMSs) can provide teaching analytics for many instructional behaviors. By building an analytics dashboard that collects instructor and student behaviors in online classrooms, institutions may be able to evaluate and support instructors in a more cost-effective and efficient way. This chapter will discuss the use of teaching analytics and their role in creating a holistic approach to teaching evaluation and faculty support.

Incentivizing Adjunct Faculty Participation in Professional Development

Without professional development, faculty members may not stay current in their methods and techniques for teaching, which can translate into a less effective learning environment for students. With online education and programs growing in an upward trend, it is imperative that faculty members have access to professional development that support current online teaching methodology and pedagogical/andrological practices. Turning to motivational methods may increase the level of engagement with professional development, where adjunct faculty members feel they are rewarded for their time and participation. This chapter uses motivation theories as a framework to review the existing literature on incentives for online adjunct faculty members who engage in professional development and the best practices for professional development. Colleges and universities can use this information to establish professional development programs and practices that may increase the level of online adjunct faculty members' participation in professional development opportunities.

What Do Remote Adjunct Faculty Look for in an Institution?

Online learning in higher education has grown tremendously in the past decade. This trend has been particularly evident at The Pennsylvania State University, where the number of online-only learners now exceeds 20,000. The biggest challenge to institutions like ours is identifying, attracting, and retaining enough instructors who are qualified and available to meet the increased demand of online student enrollment. To help administrators and program chairs tackle these challenges, a research study was conducted to learn more about the incentives that attract and retain a specific workforce in higher education: adjunct faculty. The findings suggest that one size does not always fit all - context matters. Instead of making general assumptions about the motivations or needs of an adjunct faculty member, we need to get to know the individual first. This study sheds light on the specific extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that attract and retain each of five types of adjunct faculty to teach online, which can help program administrators be more effective in hiring and retaining adjuncts.

The State of Remote Professional Development and the True Confessions of a Remote Adjunct Faculty

With the growth of online learning, the number of remote adjunct faculty has increased. Like their traditional counterparts, these faculty members need and benefit from professional development. However, remote faculty have distinct needs due to geographic separation, motivational differences, and being a part-time employee, often while holding another full-time job. This chapter reviews the current state of professional development offerings for remote faculty and the current literature on the needs and barriers faced by remote faculty. It also discusses this author's perception of barriers to and recommendations for remote faculty professional development and recommends best practices for delivering enriching opportunities for remote faculty.

Providing Course-Specific Instructor Resources in Online Classes With a Standardized Curriculum

For institutions that utilize a standardized curriculum for their online programs, providing faculty with course-specific instructional resources can enhance teaching effectiveness by streamlining individual faculty's content development and freeing instructional time to focus on interaction and feedback. But for faculty to benefit from course-specific resources, they must 1) be aware that the resources are available, 2) be able to efficiently access the resources, and 3) deem the resources valuable enough to utilize. This chapter explores two different approaches (library guide and instructor manual) for providing course-specific resources to remote, adjunct instructors and discusses the relative advantages/drawbacks of each approach. Recommendations are provided to assist institutions that utilize a standardized online curriculum to support teaching effectiveness of remote, adjunct faculty more effectively.