Online Training for Adjuncts

Abstract

New services are emerging that offer online tutorials for adjunct faculty, a group many say is marginalized and treated poorly by many colleges and universities. Higher education increasingly depends on adjuncts, often to teach night or weekend classes, and many adjunct faculty have little experience teaching. Services such as AdjunctSuccess offer online seminars and other tools to help train these part-time faculty and give them a place to correspond with others in similar situations at other universities. Critics of such programs say they do little to help adjunct faculty while encouraging the trend toward fewer tenure-track instructors in favor of part-time faculty to whom institutions have little obligation. Richard Lyons, cofounder of AdjunctSuccess, defended the company, saying colleges and universities will not be swayed to hire more adjuncts because of this training and that it provides a needed resource for an entire class of faculty who are often left behind.