Designing Selection Procedures for Hiring Online Instructors

By Peter Simmons, Vivian Chen, Monique Ring and Michael Nastanski.

Published by Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal

Format	Price
Article: Print	$US10.00
Article: Electronic	$US5.00

With the present boom in online education (Sloan, 2005), it is surprising that so little attention has been directed to selecting successful online instructors. Hiring online adjunct faculty will be discussed here; with particular attention focused on problems that can occur in hiring professors to teach in these settings. Although it is thought that most educational institutions require some form of training in using their platforms, Puziferro (2007) discusses problems (such as “The Non-Responders, the Overcommitted Faculty Member, The Technical Toddler”, etc.) that can occur. Clearly, the damage to educational programs from employing instructors who are deficient in their online skills can sometimes be irreversible.
The most common approaches to hiring online instructors will be discussed here, along with the identification of the skills, knowledges and backgrounds that are seen as most important for successful online teaching. Ideas for designing selection tools for picking online instructors are outlined, including experience questionnaires, interview questions, technology assessment ideas, and multiple-battery ideas. Evaluation procedures should be included as a part of this design system as well. They should encompass feedback from the students, an outside reviewer of what is occurring in the class, input from a mentor, the supervisor, an analysis of the support provided by the organization, along with formal validation studies of the final selection system used.
Finally, the information gained should be used in a feedback loop to make improvements in online classroom programs. Simply assigning an instructor to an online class because they say that they have taught online is a mistake. The ultimate goal should be designing in quality—as is true for all educational programs.

Keywords:	Online Education, Selection Procedures, Hiring Online Instructors, Adjunct Hiring Processes

Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp.137-142. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 692.486KB).

Dr. Peter Simmons

Associate Dean of the School of Business, School of Business, St. Leo University, St. Leo, USA

Dr. Simmons is the Associate Dean of the School of Business at St. Leo University. His educational background is in Industrial/Organizational Psycholgy. He worked for 20+ years in the Human Resource Department for the City of Clearwater, Fl. His specialty in that setting was selecting employees for hire, training them and evaluating them. He has taught in online programs for the last 10 years and is especially concerned about delivering quality instruction via that medium.

Dr. Vivian Chen

Lecturer/Instructor, College of Business Administration/MarketingDepartment, Florida International University, Miami, USA

Dr. Chen teaches Marketing at Florida International University. She holds her Doctorate in Management and an MBA in Marketing. Dr. Chen is originally from Taiwan. She is extremely interested in the use of technology in instructional settings and especially how to design these systems for maximum learning. Dr. Chen has designed and taught multiple online classes and completed her dissertation in the online educational area. She has also traveled and conducted business in numerous international settings.

Dr. Monique Ring

Instructor, School Of Business, Argosy University--Sarasota, Sarasota, New Hampshire, USA

Dr. Monique Ring has her Doctorate in Management. She has designed and taught numerous online classes. She also possesses a CPA License within the State of Florida. Her Disseration was on Assessing Satisfactory Performance and Learning in an Online Program.

Dr. Michael Nastanski

Dean of the School of Business, School of Business, Saint Leo University, Saint Leo, Fl., USA

Dr. Michael Nastanski is the Dean of the School of Business at Saint Leo University. He completed his Doctorate in Marketing. Dr. Nastanski is an experienced online instructor and hires many people to teach for the School of Business (both online and in the regular classroom). He is devoted to quality instruction in all classes. Previous to working in higher education Dr. Nastanski worked within the computer industry.

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