Angelo Teaches Online for a Variety of Institutions

Angelo is an adjunct professor for three online universities, as well as a full-time public school counselor for children with special needs. He teaches content-focused courses in sociology at the undergraduate level. Angelo teaches three online nine-week courses per semester year-round and one face-to-face course outside of his regular full-time job. His course enrollment averages 20 non-traditional learners with a wide age range. To balance his workload, he uses design, support, teaching, and time allocation strategies.

 

Design	Spent 25 hours per week for eight weeks to redesign one face-to-face course for the online environment during training. This redesign served as a guide for subsequent online course design. Keeps track of course redesign in a notebook and reflects on how he can use that in future courses.
Support	Participated in an intensive training program.
Teaching	Teaches similar courses on a regular basis. This can be confusing when the instructor has learners from multiple courses and institutions. To prevent this confusion, he developed an online form to get to know, monitor, and respond to learners during his online courses. Keeps student information in a notebook to easily identify individual learners, respond to them, or comment on their writing. Sets blocks of focused time aside for writing and responding to his learners. Saves responses from learner feedback and reuses those responses for future courses.
Time-Allocation	Preparation time, including his training, was about 250 hours. Time spent on subsequent online courses was cut back significantly to about 25 hours for each course. Spends an average of 15 hours per week per online course, which can be an overload for someone who has another full-time position. His rationale for working on overload is that he plans eventually to give up his full-time job and teach exclusively online.

 

Teaching online for multiple institutions, in addition to holding down a full-time job, can be a challenge for at least three reasons: preparation time, learner monitoring, and allocating time for teaching. Angelo realizes that time spent on online course preparation, though time-consuming, can be a time saver later because once a course design model has been created, he can reset his online courses more efficiently. He also recognizes that it can be difficult to monitor learners from different institutions during a given semester. He resolves this issue by using a form to easily identify his virtual learners and keep track of their progress. By blocking his time during hours when he is most productive, he can work more efficiently.

 

Reference

Conceição, S. C. O, Lehman, R. M. (2011). Managing Online Instructor Workload: Strategies for Finding Balance and Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.