Time flies
Capturing the extra workload costs of the Internet

By Joan Greenbaum

Anita, a full-time, tenured associate professor, invited me to look at her new course site. She was using a packaged computer application called Blackboard, one of the largest academic courseware programs. Anita is still teaching her course in the classroom, but now she extends it through a Web site that enables class discussion, individual and group e-mail and something called a “drop box’’ where students upload their papers. “I love it,” she told me, “and so do the students.” But Anita, like almost everyone else who has tried using course Web sites, adds, “It is so much more work. The students seem to think that I am available 24/7.”

The U.S. Department of Education found that in 2001—during the first wave of online course implementation—almost 3 million students were enrolled in for-credit online courses, up from 1.3 million in 1997. In 2001, administrators’ eyes lit up to the promise of enhanced university earnings without the expense of brick-and-mortar campuses. Today, after private universities like Columbia and New York University folded their financially unviable distance learning companies, students, administrators and faculty are taking a more hybrid approach. But as Anita and others have found out, running class sessions supplemented with online work adds to their workload.

Faculty find that creating and maintaining course Web sites takes some training and a good deal of experimenting in new pedagogical practices. While many faculty report that they are excited about trying new tools and approaches, the technical training they may receive from their colleges doesn’t begin to get them past the problems they encounter when they add Internet components to their existing courses. Bret Eynon, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), puts the problem this way: “The pedagogy should go before the technology, but many colleges have it backwards.” This adds to the time squeeze as faculty combine traditional teaching, experimenting and training, along with added hours updating their Web sites, downloading student papers and answering e-mail.

The biggest time challenge for most teachers is checking online discussion boards and responding to student e-mail. Faculty I spoke to for this article estimated that, on average, they spend an additional 5 to 10 hours a week doing this work.

Carol Oliver, a recent Ph.D. in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center of City University, studied workload among a group of faculty who were teaching online at a state community college. Her dissertation found significantly longer hours for teachers and added stress as their work lives spilled over to their home lives. Most of the faculty she interviewed chose to try to answer at least some student e-mail from home, often working past midnight to keep up with student questions.

The New York State United Teachers and the AFT have developed best practices guides (see sidebar) for faculty trying online and Web-enhanced teaching. Such guides are important starting places for faculty as they experiment with online tools. The guides offer advice for keeping an eye on how long one is sitting in front of a computer and remembering that workloads are covered in our union contracts.

Sometimes, as professionals, we have a tendency to exploit ourselves in the name of doing the best we can for students. Online and hybrid courses offer such a trap. To date there has been a great deal of research about student learning online, but comparatively little aimed at understanding online teaching and the impact it has on our working lives. It’s time to fix that.