Internet Learning Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2012 | Page 59

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Internet Learning

10. Extensive use of adjunct/part-time faculty who are often not located on or even near the
school in question, resulting in inequities for office hours and administrative requirements.
11. Differences in office hour and administrative requirements for full-time online versus fulltime in-class faculty.
12. Pressure to include attractive “bells and whistles” in the delivery of online courses, which,
when included in the Student Evaluations, can potentially and differentially influence the
perception of faculty performance in the eyes of students and administrators.
13. The continuing debate about quality differences between online and face-to-face courses,
with each side claiming inferiority of the other (Milliron 2010).
14. Professors having their teaching practices evaluated by non-faculty, course design staff.
Administrative Concerns
1. The competitive education environment requiring new marketing strategies focused on student
enrollments and retention (Aldridge 2010).
2. The pressure to ensure comparable quality of all courses, regardless of delivery format, in
order to satisfy regional and specialized accreditation criteria, oversight from funding sources,
etc.
3. Extensive pressure to standardize course content and formats, especially among universities
that utilize large numbers of adjunct faculty to teach online courses.
4. Extensive administrative policies for ensuring that online and in-class instructors are
comparably involved with their students in the teaching-learning process.
5. Questions of intellectual property ownership.
6. Concerns regarding faculty compensation and overhead costs.
7. How to equate office hour requirements in-class versus online.
8. Documenting/monitoring attendance and course participation through use of software and
other methods.
9. Competing pressures with regard to policies and practices relating to online course
enrollments.