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3 Online Teaching and the Deskilling of Academic Labor in Canada Natalie Sharpe and Dougal MacDonald Athabasca University (AU) is an accredited research university founded in 1970 as the first open distance education university in Alberta, Canada. It was modeled on the prestigious British Open University, founded in 1969, which offered each registered student an assigned academic instructor called a “tutor.” AU aimed from the start to offer “open entry” to affordable quality university education to those wishing to pursue higher education on a parttime or distance basis—that is, students lacking access to traditional institutions . AU reaches remote aboriginal communities, mothers working at home, students with disabilities, workers studying part time, incarcerated learners, and other marginalized groups. It provides a variety of online undergraduate, graduate, and certificate courses in areas such as anthropology, chemistry, education, and business. Each year, thirty-two thousand students attend the university. Students enroll online mainly from Canada but also from the rest of the world. Two hundred sixty thousand students have taken courses since the university was founded. Athabasca University remains a virtual university that provides almost all of its educational offerings online, relying on computers and the Internet to distribute its courses through distance education. Other online universities across the globe are also offering all their courses online. At the same time, many traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, which previously conducted only face-to-face classes in classrooms, are also now offering online courses. One of the most recent innovations is MOOCs, or massive open online courses. MOOCs are free online courses for an unlimited number of students, aimed at achieving mass student participation through open access via the Internet. At the same time, such courses do not typically count for degree credit. The situation today is that there are now many institutions worldwide—private and public, nonprofit and for-profit—offering distance education courses, which run the gamut from the most basic instruction to the highest levels of degree and doctoral programs. This proliferation has created an unprecedented level of competition for online students on a global 65 scale, a situation that did not exist at the time AU was founded over forty years ago. As at other postsecondary institutions, both traditional and online, the 295 contracted tutors at Athabasca University do the bulk of the teaching. In 1980, with over one hundred tutors, AU separated the teaching staff into two kinds of academics: full-time tenured professors with university offices and contracted part-time tutors working from home. In 1983, the tutors formed their own association to improve wages and working conditions. The tutors had attempted to join the full-time tenured faculty association, but they had been rejected by that association’s members and by the AU administration, which claimed that tutors were not academic staff. In response, tutors from this rather remote institution in western Canada unionized with the central Canada-based Canadian Union of Educational Workers (CUEW) as Local 11. In 1990, the first collective agreement was reached through arbitration. In 1993, Alberta’s long-ruling Progressive Conservative government began massive cuts to education, leading to AU reducing tutor numbers from 250 to 150 and implementing a 5 percent wage rollback for three years. In 1994, the CUEW disintegrated and the AU tutors became Local 3911 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Canada’s largest union of public sector workers. While the vast majority of AU tutors have master’s and doctoral degrees and many years of teaching experience, they differ from full-time AU faculty in many important ways. Tutors can only be part-time workers; they are prohibited by the university from tutoring full time. However, tutors must still respond to any student request within forty-eight hours, including Saturday and Sunday, and so are constantly on call, unlike full-time faculty, who work a conventional thirty-five-hour work week. Tutors receive lower wages than full-time salaried faculty, with more and more of tutor pay calculated on a “piecework” basis. If tutors do the jobs of higher-paid staff such as course coordinators as temporary replacements, they receive no additional pay. Tutors go through a five-step process of pay rates based on seniority, “topping out” after nine years at a much lower pay level than full-time faculty and taking longer to reach the final level. Full-time faculty top out at a salary of $143,000 per year (plus annual cost of living adjustments) for 1.0 full-time equivalent...

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