Blending with Adjuncts: Curriculum Design with Adjuncts

Brandman University in Irvine, CA, was founded on the principles of offering dynamic learning opportunities to the working adult student who puts into practice what is learned in the classroom. The University has 25 campuses in California and Washington State as well as an online "campus." Based on survey feedback from our students, we embarked on a project to transform our face-to-face courses to the blended model, by which students attend classes one night a week and continue to learn through our online component. This change in delivery method allowed the university to review all the courses being offered and decide how best to make the transition to blended on a course-by-course basis. All full-time faculty were asked to blend some courses in their teaching specialization, and some adjuncts were invited to blend courses if we did not have full-time faculty capacity. Now that we are ready to launch these courses, we have begun the second part of this process: engage part-time faculty in the engaged learning model as we build a learning community across all campuses. Brandman has developed a process by which each course "blender" will form a virtual learning community with all the other faculty teaching the course, either part-time or full-time. We are asking each person to teach the course as written for this one semester as they take notes on what works well, what does not work, offers suggestions on alternative assignments or discussions, or develops different technology tools that could be used successfully. Cognizant of the schedules adjuncts often have, we deliberately structured the interactions among the faculty to be minimally intrusive but with a good return on the investment of time. Based on the input from the instructors and the interactions and recommendations from the teams, all courses will then be enhanced based on the additional materials and feedback faculty have contributed. We see two powerful outcomes from this project: faculty across the two states will develop a connection with others in their field who also teach our students, and our courses will be much more robust because of the contributions of all who teach the courses. Mitigating the isolation most adjuncts feel, we believe we will enhance the teaching experience of each instructor who now has connections to every other instructor of that course. In addition, our students profit from the curriculum design based on materials and teaching experiences from not one instructor but every instructor. This presentation would include brief PowerPoints of the model we developed but focus the presentation on the implementation of this project across a distributed systems. Objectives for the presentation are as follows: • Attendees will learn how to earn the support of seasoned adjunct faculty to teach a fully developed course with minimal changes during a period of development • Attendees will learn how to develop and implement a large scale training for teaching the blended model across a distributed system. Using an approach such as will be demonstrated develops a baseline for course and student • Presenters will share the steps employed to build a learning community among adjuncts teaching a course • Presenters will share data on participation rates and feedback from the adjuncts on the process • Presenters will share next steps as relates to the revision and enhancement of courses based on faculty input • Based on the presentation and comments, continue to refine a process by which adjuncts actively contribute to the curriculum and deepen their commitment to the university