Adjunct faculty now make up the majority of higher education instructors nationwide, yet, they seemed to be left out when planning professional development opportunities and it’s more difficult to build their capacity to innovate. Through our project, we worked with 10 adjuncts to design innovative courses to increase student success.
Adjunct faculty now make up the majority of higher education instructors nationwide, yet, they seemed to be left out when planning professional development opportunities or when paid course building opportunities arise. Because of this, it’s more difficult to build their capacity to innovate. Innovation is a concept that challenges many colleges and universities. How can we inspire adjunct faculty, who feel underappreciated and underpaid to use innovative tools and pedagogies as they teach their courses and improve student outcomes?
This year, our board approved a new strategic plan with innovation as one of the three main categories that faculty and staff should strive to meet. Many of our full time faculty were unsure how to define educational innovation and were nervous to try new ideas on their own without support and we felt our adjuncts were struggling even more. Our adjunct faculty do not have the support level that the full time faculty do. This led us to design an innovation framework that was both collaborative and supportive, specifically for adjunct faculty. The project was approved by our Strategic Plan Project Committee. We were able to offer 10 adjunct faculty members a fellowship to take our online innovative course design workshop and to spend time working one on one with instructional designers and instructional technologists to create innovate course designs. We faced challenges and successes through this project; however the end result was very positive. By offering adjunct faculty the opportunity to collaborate and be supported as they tried new things, innovative ideas emerged.