The San Mateo Community College Federation of Teachers Union recently negotiated and the faculty approved the very first contract language designed for distance education.
The contract includes training, copyrights, compensation, class assignments, “virtual” office hours and a few other issues for online courses. However, there is no contract language addressing class size for online courses.
According to Librarian/Professor Eric Brenner, most of the faculty’s greatest concern is on the workload and time needed to help each student.
“The union has been trying to get these issues negotiated for quite a while,” Brenner said. “The district has been somewhat reluctant to put language on distance education until the last round of negotiations where they decided it was a good idea to finally do it.”
A lot of the focus has been on training and compensation. The District Education Committee made up of about 12 faculty members from Skyline, Cañada, and College of San Mateo, are concentrating on a training program.
“A lot of the initiative that the District Education Committee has done is a faculty training program,” said Patty Dilko, Professor of Early Childhood Education and Child Development. “It’s where the faculty can be apart of a special study program that helps them learn how to put courses online.”
The faculty that is experiencing online courses for the first time have a whole different set of concerns. The large workload of online courses seems to be the biggest concern for most of the online instructors and students.
“If classroom size and workload are controlled, more faculty might be interested in teaching online,” instructor Virginia Gianoli said.
According to Dilko, the issues dealing with online courses are all pretty complicated, but offering more online classes is one of the goals.
“We have to be very strategic and thoughtful when we develop distance education and make sure it fits into the overall program that we are offering as a college,” Dilko said. “That’s what the Academic Senate is doing, making sure the classes are good, and also fit into the program.”
There are plans for a Trust Committee to be made up of faculty, union, academic senate, and administrators. The committee will review all faculty evaluations and create new evaluation processes for online courses. Student evaluations weren’t dealt with in the last negotiation and they are planning to be improved next semester.
There are additional topics the union will discuss in the next round of negotiations. The most significant would be the pay for teachers that are creating the online courses and redesigning a course.
“For any course you need to update what you’re teaching,” Brenner said. “But when it’s an online course you have a lot of details, tutorials, and instructions, which is a lot more work.”
Gianoli explains that she prefers traditional classes over online classes because the classroom interaction is a lot easier and understandable for students.
According to Brenner, the District also didn’t want to deal with class size. Many faculty members believe classes should be smaller for online courses and if they aren’t instructors should be paid more for larger classes.
“Personally, I have found that teaching online takes a lot more time then teaching a classroom based class,” Brenner said. “There’s so much back and forth through e-mail and a lot of individual help for students.”
Dilko agrees that the faculty should be compensated for their work and that faculty should be provided the resources necessary to create the curriculum for students because “curriculum development is a faculty responsibility.”
“We have two major groups bumping heads on faculty issues,” Dilko said. “We see it from different perspectives, but we have the same concerns.”
