Cover Story

Distance Education: Getting Started

by Jo Gibson

Adjunct faculty have a wide comfort zone: they prepare lectures, monitor classroom discussion, devise tests, assign grades--no problem! However, even for faculty with wide-ranging professional skills and expe- rience, on-line teaching can be a hard sell. Consider Dr. David Dutton [pseud.], professor and department chair. Aggressively pursuing additional work to supplement his income, he is now an on-line adjunct faculty member at seven institutions of higher education.

“The coursework on-line is just as rigorous,” he says, “and I’ve found ways to establish my professorial presence in the on-line classroom. The students need that, and they love on-line learning.”

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Letter From The Editor:
we're Back And Better Than Ever!!

Letter from the editor

by P.D. Lesko

It seems ages since I wrote my column. I know that for many of you, this issue of Adjunct Advocate marks a return to the magazine after an interruption in our regular publishing schedule. What we have been doing is planning and implementing a huge change in the life of our 15-year-old publication. We have taken the magazine and made it a completely electronic publication. What this means is that readers will no longer receive a print edition. Instead, the contents will be available online, and each issue will be available in PDF format for readers to download, print out and archive.

Why did we do this? For the same reason, 15 years ago, we founded a magazine for part-time and adjunct college faculty. Then, few within higher education were writing about the plight of the nation’s temporary faculty. Inside Higher Education didn’t exist, and The Chronicle of Higher Education touched, usually tangentially, on the subject during the course of reporting on issues impacting full-time faculty and/or administrators. Every so often, a major newspaper would run a piece about the glut of Ph.D. holders competing for a shrinking number of academic jobs. (Of course, the majority of those off the tenure track do not hold Ph.D.s.) The education unions represented part-time faculty, of course, but some union leaders did so unhappily, seeing part-time faculty as loss leaders. It was at that moment, in September of 1992, that we launched Adjunct Advocate as a print publication.

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Super Adjunct Blog

Super Adjunct Vs. "Brian"

Posted: April 2nd, 2010

There are those adjuncts who just always seem to land on their feet (or better yet, with the exact number of courses they want always at the prime hours of the day). Brian is one of them.

Comments: 0

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