Adult Degree Completion programs survive and benefit the university, as I’ve mentioned before, by providing an education to an underserved population and by providing surplus revenue back to the University. The source of this surplus comes primarily from the use of adjunct instructors who teach from 25% to 80% of the courses. This may sound surprising, but when using structured curriculum as I discussed in my previous post, this actually provides a solid educational experience to the student comparable to that found in the traditional classroom. In some cases, due to the fact that the adjunct instructor is often a working professional, the educational experience is even better due to their ability to bring their experience into the classroom.

When I first entered higher education I became aware that most new traditional faculty are usually given a syllabus, but not always, of how a course had been taught before, and pretty much left to their own to figure out how they want to teach the course. There is little or no instruction provided to traditional faculty of pedagogy, or curriculum design. There is little or no direction given to assess whether their syllabus measures up to “college level” learning, whatever that means. This is higher education’s dirty little secret: under the guise of academic freedom, there is no measure of course quality, and the same course can be taught in content and delivery radically different from one instructor to the next and from one institution to the next. After some trial and error over a few semesters, most of these faculty, if they survive, find a balance, and if their content and delivery is not exceptional, it is at least acceptable. Pity the poor students who had to take the course during this settling-in period.

The benefit of the ADC classroom is the curriculum, especially when accompanied by thorough faculty notes. These faculty notes provide the framework for the adjunct’s experience to shine by giving them the tools they need to deliver the content in an adult-friendly format. The curriculum provides the pedagogy and curriculum design missing in the traditional format, raising the whole experience for the student to a higher level.

The key pieces for those leading ADC programs, when it comes to the faculty, are:

• make sure they have the requisite credentials required by the accrediting body,
• that they have a true desire to pass along their knowledge,
• that they are willing to learn how to teach, and
• that they are flexible, as ADC programs almost always require some flexibility in course scheduling.

Once hired, then comes the crucial step of Faculty Orientation/Development which will be the subject of my next post.