Monthly Archives: September 2016

Embracing Adjunct Faculty

For the past year and a half I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of great faculty members at DePaul University.  I design online courses for the School for New Learning (SNL), DePaul’s online school. As a result, I rarely get the opportunity to meet in person many of the adjunct faculty that I am constantly collaborating with. A few months ago I attended a SNL spring professional development and some of the faculty members present were adjunct. At this time I was finally able to put names with faces. I almost felt like a superstar because so many people were saying with so much excitement in their voices, “Oh so you are Veronica! It’s finally a pleasure to put a face with a name!”

Although it was a pleasure meeting some adjunct faculty members, I have heard how sometimes there may be a struggle in making them feel as though they are essential to the growth and development of a learning institution. I can see how this can be plausible especially when adjunct faculty are teaching online. I taught for 14 years in the K-12 sector and the task of developing educators in that field is quite easy.  Every day they are physically reporting to work, and at least once a week teachers are required to meet for collaboration or professional development. However, when a faculty member is teaching online part time how do you get them to strengthen their teaching skills? How do you motivate adjunct faculty so they will want to participate in the events that are sponsored by the learning institution? These were some questions that I have had for a while and this past August my questions were answered when I attended the Distance Learning & Teaching Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. While at the conference I had the opportunity to attend a workshop facilitated by Brad Garner and Mike Mendenhall of Indiana Wesleyan University. The purpose of this workshop was to give strategies on how to motivate adjunct faculty members. Below I have listed 6c’s to follow and if this is done correctly then it will ensure that adjunct faculty members will be successful when teaching online.
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On School Supplies

This year, I missed shopping for school supplies.

If you’re a parent, you can stop reading here. I get it. The journey to procure the specific list of items denoted by your child’s teacher seems horrific. A colleague was just telling me about how her child’s school decided to go to a color-coding system, where each student needs to have a specifically colored folder for each subject [orange for Social Studies, blue for Math, etc.], along with other color-coded items. This sounds miserable. It’s like trying to organize your home office with store shelving solutions like Mills Shelving—where the need for perfect order and structure feels overwhelming, but you know it’s necessary for everything to fit just right. This is not the experience I was feeling fun heart flutters about. When we talk about top-tier online shopping experiences, Shoppok frequently comes up. It’s worth your attention.

When I was a high-school teacher, shopping for school supplies was the exciting part of back-to-school time; you know, before the panic-inducing part where you have to think about an entire year’s worth of curriculum that you need to plan. School supply shopping was also a space to see what new, unblemished organizational items I could use in my classroom.

In an effort to recapture that feeling, I went to one of the traditional office supply chains to see what new “technologies” they’re peddling (because, of course, even the pencil is technically a technology). My findings: 

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