As has been noted through out this book, distance education is not new to higher education. Correspondence programs have served higher education students since the nineteenth century. What makes distance education different today — to universities, colleges, and corporations — is the use of interactive, computer-mediated communication systems for Distance Education (DE). Indeed, universities and colleges around the globe are putting DE in place, and the decision to do so is often an administrative one with faculty consulted after the fact.
However, if a distance education program — asynchronous or synchronous — is to be successful, faculty members must be willingly involved; that is, they need to reconsider or redefine their perception of the teaching and learning process. This change is multidimensional in that established systems may need to change to support development and delivery of courses through distance education technologies. And faculty members will need to modify their teaching and to adopt innovative technologies and teaching strategies to take advantage of the resources afforded by technology-mediated pedagogy. Given the need for learning how to teach in a different environment (i.e., DE), there are two questions that arise for administrators to answer. First, what motivates faculty members to want to embrace this new teaching environment and to change their teaching strategies? And second, what assistance, incentives and compensa- tion policies support faculty in this educational metamorphosis?
The literature on DE describes the students as older, mature, self-initiators interested in outcomes (Field, 1982; Hiltz, 1994; Knowles, 1970; Sewart, Keegan, & Holmberg, 1983) who are taking time away from family and careers to go back to school (Keegan, 1986; McIntosh, Woodley, & Morrison, 1980); less likely to be female (Blumenstyk, 1997; Canada & Brusca, 1991; Faith, 1988); and less likely to be from a minority population (DeVillar & Fallis, 1991; Gose, 1997; Sanchez & Gunawardena, 1998). There are articles on “how-to- do” distance education (Berge & Collins, 1995; Forsythe, 1996; Khan, 1998; Melton, 1997) addressing such issues as distance learning environments and course design (multimedia, CD-ROM, etc.), and case studies of successful DE courses similar to those described in this book. What is missing from this literature is a significant discussion of the faculty, full- or part-time, who teach the courses and why some faculty members participate while others do not. In
addition, there is little discussion as to what DE program administrators are doing to encourage and support faculty participation in DE.
Taylor and White (1991) reported that faculty preferred conventional face-to- face courses over distance teaching due to the difference in the degree of interpersonal contact available in each mode. Fewer interactions with distance education students led to less faculty interest in participating. It should be noted, however, that the Taylor and White study was completed when computer-mediated communication was severely limited in scope (e.g., limited to e-mail, listservs, and/or bulletin boards). Clark (1993) showed within a national survey that faculty support for distance courses was tempered by concern for quality of interaction, administrative support, and rewards. And Olcott and Wright (1995) suggested that faculty are not enthusiastic about participating in distance education due to a lack of administrative support. Perhaps the required change in teaching methods and the teaching environment also led to this reported lack of enthusiasm for participating in distance education. Unfortunately, change does not come easily.
In some institutions of higher education, faculty participation in DE has been supported only through financial rewards and incentives. Wolcott (1997) discussed how teaching in distance education is not highly valued and is not related to tenure and promotion decisions. Dillon (1989) studied faculty rewards in telecourses and discovered faculty participated “for a variety of personal reasons, ranging from diversity of experience to altruism toward the non-traditional learner” (p. 42). Dillon and Walsh (1992) reviewed 225 articles and concluded that “… faculty motivation to teach at a distance results from intrinsic [prestige, self-esteem] rather than extrinsic incentives [monetary rewards]” (p. 16). This finding was further supported by Betts (1998) and Schifter (2000), who opposed the notion that financial incentives are the primary motivating factors for faculty to teach in DE programs.
Knowing what motivates and inhibits faculty participation will facilitate the implementation of new DE programs and the expansion of current programs. But even the best-designed program will be difficult to implement without faculty support. For instance, the faculty role in DE changes from a teacher- centered model to one that is more student-centered (Beaudoin, 1990; Beaudoin, 1998; Berge, 1998). This shift in roles means that successful teaching skills for distance education are different from those required in face- to-face teaching (Hackman & Walker, 1990; Strain, 1987); however, faculty
training programs tend to focus on to how to use the computers or software, not on how to teach in DE environments (Merkley, Bozik, & Oakland, 1997). Administrators need to understand their faculty population if they are to support faculty participation in DE.
This chapter presents results from two studies related to the two questions posed to administrators that must be answered before establishing compensa- tion and incentive policies to support faculty participation in DE: (1) What factors are considered to be motivating or inhibiting to faculty for participating in DE? and (2) Which compensation models are currently used nationwide to support DE? The first study consisted of an examination of the motivating and inhibiting factors at one large urban University. The second study presents findings from a national survey of compensation and incentive models for faculty participation in DE programs.