Tenure-track Faculty Determine the Success of Online Graduate Education

Response 1 to "Meeting Twenty-First-Century Needs: Spanish for the Professions as the Future of Spanish Graduate Education?"

"Meeting Twenty-First-Century Needs: Spanish for the Professions as the Future of Spanish Graduate Education?" provides insights to how one particular university is confronting the decreased student enrollments seen across foreign language (FL) graduate programs in the United States. The author discusses the importance of online post-graduate language courses through examples of how such courses would meet a variety of working professionals' needs as well as increase languishing enrollments in post-graduate FL programs. This argument is followed by an overview of an existing online Spanish for the Professions Master of Science degree (SPMS).

While the SPMS clearly fills a gap in FL education, the widespread skepticism that many language educators harbor regarding online language courses may impede the quality, vitality, and implementation of such programs (Blake 2007). Elizabeth Harsma (2017) briefly alludes to and refutes common objections to online FL language education but admits that faculty interest continues to be an issue since two faculty members primarily teach the courses. While the programmatic structure is innovative and promising, the reader is left to question the longevity and quality of the program as the author fails to mention strategies for training and recruiting tenured and tenure-track faculty who are qualified to teach at the post-graduate level.

The lack of tenured and tenure-track faculty interest in online education (Allen and Seaman 2010; Kim and Bonk 2006) is illustrated by the numerous studies on non-tenured online faculty in comparison to limited publications regarding online tenured and tenure-track faculty (Drewelow 2013; LoBasso 2013). One factor that may contribute to this phenomenon is that tenured and tenure-track positions are evaluated largely on research production with little incentive for undertaking new pedagogical endeavors (Zhao and Cziko 2001). The lack of incentive that the tenure track system places on pedagogical innovation is compounded by the fact that novice online instructors must invest a considerable amount of time in familiarizing themselves with course materials, digital platforms, and resources provided by ancillary staff such as instructional designers and web programmers (Bartolic-Zlomislic and Bates 1999; Stone and Perumean-Chaney 2011). Such distractions from academic research may explain why part- time and adjunct faculty are more frequently assigned online teaching assignments than full-time faculty (Seaman 2009).

Despite the aforementioned challenges in recruiting tenured and tenure-track faculty to teach online, experienced online professors reported an increase in productivity as the flexibility of online instruction allowed them to spend more time on service or research (Meyer 2012). In order to help T/TT faculty reconceptualize online teaching, departmental training and faculty mentorship programs are an indispensable means of helping faculty integrate technology in a way that presents minimal disturbances to their established academic routine (Gabriel and Kaufield 2008; Zhao and Cziko 2001). In conclusion, the future of online graduate programs such as SPMS does not depend on the clever creation of online courses but the department's commitment to training/incentivizing tenured and tenure-track faculty members to teach online.