Online adjuncts: teaching Web-based courses appeals to administrators, but they find demands aren't few

School Administrator, Nov, 2002 by Kimberly Reeves

When James Warlick, a superintendent in south Texas, talks about the travel to get his doctorate degree, he's talking both literally and figuratively.

Warlick recalls the hours of sleep deprivation, the Monday mornings throughout the summer when he would wake up in Midland, where he was superintendent of the Greenwood Independent School District, and make the 120-mile trek to Texas Tech University in Lubbock to take the required nine hours of doctoral courses. After two days in Lubbock, Warlick was back in the car to Midland, where he worked through the night in his office on his superintendent duties. A couple of hours of sleep at home and he would be back in his car for the drive again to Lubbock. The schedule was grueling but essential to advancing his career.

The school year brought even harsher demands to his dual life as a school leader and graduate student. Warlick would drive to and from Lubbock two nights a week, about 1,000 miles every five days, to complete his requisite coursework. The pace allowed Warlick to meet his residency requirements for his Ed.D. in educational administration and complete the required 24 hours of coursework each year. He eventually quit his post in Midland, took a job as an educational consultant outside Dallas and drove the 45-minute trip to the University of North Texas to finish his degree. It was the only way he could complete his dissertation.

"All the hoops made it almost insurmountable to get a doctorate," says Warlick, who now serves as superintendent of the 4,050-student Calallen district outside Corpus Christi. "With the residency requirements, you really end up doing two jobs, and you're nor productive at either thing that you're doing."

So when Texas A&M University-Kingsville called to ask him to teach online courses in its graduate program in educational administration, Warlick warmed quickly to the invitation. He had been through four bond elections and building programs in his years as a superintendent in north and south Texas and he thought he had something to offer to fledgling school leaders, What's more, he could appreciate better than most school leaders the newfound convenience of electronic delivery of graduate instruction.

Real-World Relevancy

Hiring adjunct faculty from the practitioner ranks was a godsend to Texas A&M University-Kingsville. As coordinator Robert Marshall freely admits, the superintendency sequence was "absolutely dead" four years ago. With competition from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, as well as several universities within a couple of hour's drive to the south, Kingsville's superintendent certification program was floundering. Texas A&M-Kingsville, a regional university with 6,000 students, had six long-time tenured professors teaching graduate education courses on the campus.

"There was no aggressiveness within the faculty to recruit," admits Marshall, who describes his university department as aging. "People were going to Laredo, going to Pan Am, going to Corpus Christi, going to UT-San Antonio, and we were interested in drawing them in.

We were to the point where classes couldn't make it (because enrollment was so low)."

Still the university's 45-hour principal certification program was thriving. Marshall considered the introduction of the online option for the superintendent's certificate--a 15-hour program--a "do or die" move. Marshall himself taught the first online course, a school finance class. More than 90 educators signed up for the class from as far as Waco, five hours away. There is a need for this, he decided, and a need to bring some real-world connections to classes about managing school systems.

This year, four of the five superintendent courses at Kingsville are taught online--and all are run by superintendents serving as adjunct faculty members. The fifth course is an internship.

Warlick is one of three working superintendents who teach the Web-based courses in educational administration. He runs a course on school-community relations and another on school plant and operations. Students are required to log onto the class' online bulletin board at least once a week, and the school facilities course requires a supervised field trip to a school building to discuss bond packages.

Warlick, 56, describes his teaching approach as "practical" but adds there is some irony in his conversion from working superintendent to online professor. "When I was working on my doctorate, I wrote a paper on how adjuncts might destroy the professorship at the university," he says. "Now that I'm involved in online teaching, I've realized there just aren't enough people to go around. You look at all the people who can contribute and you realize it is beneficial they can teach courses."

Motivating Factors

Linda Crawford, one of five assistant superintendents in the suburban Osseo school district just north of Minneapolis, Minn., doesn't just teach in one online graduate program. She teaches for three. Her first course, which she taught for Walden University in 1998, was curriculum theory and design. From there, her after-hours teaching expanded to the University of Phoenix and Baker College. Two of the three institutions exclusively offer college courses online.