Are Adjuncts the Future of Higher Ed?

By Gordon Freedman

“Teaching is transforming in the Internet-of-everything era. All faculty are expected to become familiar with online teaching tools and will be challenged when they are not,” Anil Agarwal, CEO, www.EdifyOnline.com 

 Hiding Behind the Gowns

Ever since the Internet began, there has been an all-encompassing conversation about the future of higher education, with billions invested in technology, online learning and modern buildings. But the promised future has remained elusive. Instead, we have seen traditional institutions charge more; fail to retain students; send students into excessive debt while bloating its bureaucracy; buy questionable technology; prop up the textbook giants and hold down the pay for its hard working, now mostly adjunct or part-time faculty.

The equation of more student debt, more vendor payments and squeezing the dominant part-time instructors who do the bulk of the teaching, does not seem like a winning proposition. Since, in the modern world, learners could be digitally matched with the right faculty who can improve their chances to find the best work options, one has to wonder, how long the current higher education models can be sustained?

Interestingly, and distressingly, COVID-19 is going to pressure-test the case of higher ed. We won’t need to wait another decade until slow erosion forces change. We will know by the end of the 2020-2021 academic year what the business-as-usual scorecard looks like.

Precedence is on the side of the pandemic to bring about change. The most cited cases – the Bubonic Plague early in the life of academia and the Spanish Flu right as the industrial revolution hit its stride – paint a very convincing picture. 

First, there will be a dip in enrollments, and then new solutions and more modernized and in-sync and diversified versions of higher education will appear. What won’t happen is a reversal or return to norms. 

In both previous cases, higher education recalibrated to the times and expanded in new ways. Today, in daily life, we are being sustained in the Coronavirus pandemic by robust online and cellular systems and infrastructure: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Verizon, AT&T, online banking, e-government services, online medicine and the list goes on. 

Those of us who worked to make online learning a reality, never considered it was going to be universal. That is all changing. By the end of the academic year, the expectation is that many online systems in higher education need to be functioning much closer to what we do every day online and in apps in our “regular” life. Those who bring these processes to bear successfully at a fair cost for students will ultimately win along with their students. 

This unusual time-out is also a chance for traditional institutions to take some lessons from the for-profit and private online providers while retaining their own unique value propositions.

The New Messengers of Change

As someone who has been involved in technology and online education since the mid 1990s, I have been surprised by new entrants into the K12, higher ed and workforce worlds. They have evolved outside of the in-crowd ed-tech, online or workforce dialogues. They are outsiders. They have not attended the ASU-GSV conference or courted and rested their hopes on venture capitalists. Nor have they come out of higher education or K12 administration or sought to turn academic grants into education businesses. These new businesses are as likely as the printing press once was to help reorganize higher education.

One company is looking at the student journey across the school and college education, training and employment segments. The segments are usually locked off from each other even though many students or adult learners transit them all in different ways, usually with difficulty. Or, more likely, just miss out on opportunities. Another start-up is looking at the improvement of middle management in higher education – especially transitioning into new roles that require more finesse and management than required of faculty. Think of faculty becoming chairs, deans or associate provosts and the assistance they could use going into their new roles. And then there is another entrant that is focusing on marketing non-credit and skills-based courses in a portal populated by multiple community colleges, openly marketing to real world leaners and job-seekers.

Making a Business of Improving Online Adjunct Instructors

Another company, www.EdifyOnline.com, is thinking of higher education’s future in a new way. Its founder comes from a decidedly industrial past and a passion for process engineering. He looks at the operation of higher education in terms of guaranteeing teaching quality, first for the student, then for the institution and finally how that teaching will prepare students for where they eventually work.

Anil Agarwal established EdifyOnline in Birmingham, AL, five years ago as he morphed from industrial process engineer and consultant both for large corporations and for his own rescue of an old manufacturer of rivets and steel works. He watched his kids struggle with faculty that were not effective for them and in his globe trotting he met a few academic leaders who told him of the lack of systematic management of part-time instructors. The problem he saw was lack of clarity in matching and measuring part-time professional and academic adjuncts who teach online and now are universally required to.

"Our differentiator,” says Agarwal, “is that we focus on online course performance specifically. We offer the opportunity for instructors to improve their teaching process. For us, it’s about inspiring adjuncts and faculty to stay engaged in teaching a course.”

This means using a well-defined process of matching and monitoring through a technology platform plus human input to improve the full online learning lifecycle.

“We start by first qualifying candidates to specific courses, then we utilize specially designed continuous improvement tools to ensure visibility of their engagement during their teaching, and we track performance for improvement,” Agarwal said.

EdifyOnline started, where many innovations do, with MIT, which had launched its MITx online MOOC-based courses in partnership with edX. EdifyOnline found both professional and academic adjuncts to fit the needs for each course. From here, Agarwal says, EdifyOnline will move wherever improving online teaching, learning and outcomes are critical.

“The key for us is how we systematically improve accountability, visibility, self-governance/peer review consistent within continuous improvement technology framework of plan: do, observe and measure.”

What follows is an interview with Anil Agarwal, CEO of www.EdifyOnline. Personal disclosure: I have agreed to be a strategic advisor for EdifyOnline, joining a group of ed tech and retired senior administrators concerned with the quality and treatment of highly qualified professional and academic adjunct instructors.

August 15th, 2020

Freedman: What made you transfer careers and start in a field unfamiliar to you like academic employment? 

Agarwal: I often heard, for decades, that tenured faculty prefer to spend time in research and not in teaching and that the cost of higher education in the US is the highest, yet, the student learning index is lower than most of the industrialized nations. So, what is wrong? To me, the problem is clear: US universities are big, bureaucratic, rigid, and inefficient in managing teaching. The current system allows costs to go up but not learning. So, education reform is inevitable. 

Freedman: What particularly about the adjunct or part-time academic workforce interested you enough to build a company around the issue?

Agarwal: In my opinion, we have a highly educated population in the US. Most are busy making a living including those who may be open to teaching. What if we could enable this segment of highly educated and experienced human resource to help institutions? Could this help solve both the problems of cost and the quality of learning? I decided to build the company on a simple belief that US citizens are the most educated and giving population in the world and they always rise to the occasion.

Freedman: What insights have you gathered about the future of higher ed because of your research on contract employment in higher ed? 

Agarwal: Higher Ed is highly bureaucratic, rigid, and resists change. COVID-19 has challenged this mindset. Baby boomers, once considered a progressive generation in the 70s, are the biggest barrier to change today in the institution. With them retiring during this decade, I expect universities will have an opportunity to reimagine and reinvent themselves. 

Freedman: What contribution do you hope EdifyOnline will provide to higher education institutions, to contract faculty, and to the future needs of students? 

Agarwal: Education institutions hire contract faculty or temporary adjunct teaching professionals informally through referrals or with the help of staffing agencies. The flaws of this practice include its focus more on reducing teaching costs and less on improving teaching behaviors. Faculty and adjuncts, often, are not aligned. Little is done to engage them both to succeed. EdifyOnline’s focus is to act as a catalyst and a change agent; offer web-based, transparent online solutions to engage faculty and adjunct at the course specific level to improve online teaching behavior.

Freedman: How do you think the ability to teach well online will fit into hiring practices in the future?

Agarwal: The ability to teach well online is important but checks and balances are equally important to ensure consistent good teaching practices and learning success. Once this cycle is ensured, hiring practices should align on their own. I believe the future higher education ecosystem must enable six core values in teaching practices: accountability, integrity, peer-review/self-governance, transparency, student learning, and continuous improvement for a sustainable success.  

Freedman: I have heard that many campuses are letting go contract employees in favor of better online training for tenured faculty. Do you think this trend will last and, if not, what do you see occurring?

Agarwal: COVID-19 budget cuts are putting pressures on institutions to cut costs. Easy targets are adjunct and contract teaching professionals. Institutions hope to pressure tenured faculty to learn and teach online courses; it is certainly a positive change! I believe that the future of teaching will rely more on non-tenured trained professionals.

Freedman: How will your system change teaching and learning to benefit students; are you suggesting that EdifyOnline will help verify the match between professional and academic expertise of the adjunct and the course? Explain.

Agarwal: Yes, we hope to improve teaching and learning experience to benefit students by building an ecosystem to promote competent teaching professionals by screening out those who do not perform well. EdifyOnline enables search, screen, vet, and match adjuncts at a specific course level. By enabling transparency to learning objectives, engagements, and learning outcomes, and by promoting a system of self-governance and peer review, we are confident of positive outcomes.

Freedman: What do you foresee in a fully digital end-to-end solution for higher education teaching quality?

Agarwal: A fully digital teaching eco-system would consist of three major components, each with its unique core competency: 1) course contents; 2) teaching; and 3) checks and balances. Universities may do it all or outsource these roles to an OPM (online program manager) or some hybrid combination. To keep this process self-managing and continuously improving, EdifyOnline’s tools will provide 3rd party independent checks and balances.

 Freedman: What specialty can you bring to managing adjuncts who teach online; how do you separate them out from all faculty who are being asked to teach remotely now?

Agarwal: Teaching is transforming in the internet of everything era. All faculty are expected to become familiar with online teaching tools and will be challenged when they are not. EdifyOnline integrates teaching professionals, tools, and processes to a specific course within the continuous improvement framework of “plan, do, observe and measure” to allow everyone to improve. We provide that mechanism.

 Freedman: What kind of fully digital ecosystem or pipeline do you see arising between expertise (professionals) and academic faculty who are highly qualified in their specialties? What does EdifyOnline bring to the development of a more complete ecosystem? 

Agarwal: It is important to recognize that a highly qualified person is not necessarily the best teacher. A good teacher must be measured by learners’ feedback on a regular basis. This simple principle is the essence of EdifyOnline’s model. We envision a future where faculty and adjunct teaching professionals will feel responsible to give the best learning experience to learners. EdifyOnline tools and processes are designed to support such a goal.