Supporting Online Adjunct Faculty: Resources for Administrators and Staff

Given the piecemeal work of most adjunct faculty, support for this key population of instructors is unique, especially for those who are fully online. The goal of this workshop is to provide access to materials, processes, and documents that will guide administrators and staff in creating an organizational environment that will support online adjunct faculty. This offering is tailored to a number of different institutional roles that are charged with supporting, enhancing, or building adjunct faculty development programs.

In the summer of 2021, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) with support from the Every Learner Everywhere Network conducted a study to examine current practices for hiring, onboarding, developing, and supporting online adjunct faculty. According to the Online Adjunct Faculty: A Survey of Institutional Policies and Practices report, some of the teaching practices that respondents reported that online adjuncts struggle to incorporate overlap with effective practices and evidence-based teaching strategies (p. 28).

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Identify existing institutional cross-functional pathways that can be utilized for best-practice adjunct support.
• Formulate a data-informed adjunct development process to build an adjunct-friendly institutional community.
• Investigate unique approaches for adjunct professional development to elicit an adjunct inclusive institutional environment.
• Determine opportunities for adjunct and permanent faculty community through the examination of institutional community practices.