Performance Pay for Distance Educators

Performance pay, educators more for more positive academic results, is not new. It is a concept that has been tried in isolated ways in the United States for several decades. These efforts usually are limited to grade school and usually are short-lived. According to Donald B. Gratz, author of "The Problem with Performance Pay,” most attempts to pay educators based on performance are founded on flawed logic including 1. That educators are unmotivated, 2. That the institution overall is failing, and 3. That measuring the academic achievement of the students is all that matters. Each of these assumptions, according to Gratz, can easily be refuted with evidence. Most educators care about their students. Our schools and colleges produced the society that has created the world of computing, the Internet and convergent cellular phone technology. The society demands that students are literate and understand math, yes, but also that they learn to appreciate the arts, interpersonal communications, and that they become productive citizens, things which are not measured on standardized tests.

At the community college level I also feel that my colleagues care about their students and do a good job of educating them. However, President Obama’s belief that community colleges are a key part of the economic well-being and growth of the nation will likely mean greater scrutiny of student success on-ground and online. I have noted that educators in distance-learning often believe that they should be paid more for developing and conducting distance-learning courses and programs than if they were doing a comparable thing on ground. However, this doesn't seem to be in any way based on student performance. The belief is that teaching online requires more work and more time than teaching on ground. I am puzzled that efforts to garner more pay are not connected to performance. It is not clear to me that an individual should be paid more merely because it takes more effort or time to teach. If that was the case, should we pay more to a person on ground if they took more time to develop a course? Individuals should be paid more if the results are significantly better than the results in a traditional face-to-face class. In college we tend to look at two primary measures of success, grades and retention. Currently, in our online classes these two measures are statistically the same as face-to-face classes. So as of now these cannot be the bases for performance pay. However, what if we begin to look at other measures of performance? Do students online retain knowledge longer or better? Does the predominant cooperative, collaborative, and discussion-based style of the online class increase interpersonal skills which makes for a stronger workforce? Admittedly, these types of things can be hard to quantify. Yet they are likely the exact kinds of measures that if totaled could justify performance pay in distance-learning.

Rubrics & the Fudge Factor

Rubrics ensure fairness in grading the work of students. I was talking to a colleague once who did not want to use a rubric because it did not allow her to use the “fudge factor,” assigning a grade based on what you know—or feel you know—about a student rather than wholly upon the student’s actual performance. She thought the “fudge factor” was an equalizer helping to ensure students got what they deserved not just what they earned. I was horrified and took it as my mission to help her understand how not using the rubric was innately unfair to the majority of her students in a class in which the essay was the major method of assessment. With a diverse student body, many kinds of biases could creep ever so quietly and unknowingly into the grading process. Ethnicities, language, social status, styles of clothing, hairstyles, etiquette standards or lack thereof…and just the good old fashioned disdain much of the young have for older adults and authoritative types mean that, despite how hard you try, the way you see the student (in a ground class) plays into their score, in mostly subtle but perhaps sometimes in very large unconscious ways...even online. The fudge factor works against us by allowing us to reinforce subconscious biases. The only way to manage our own subconscious skewing is to use rubrics.

What Goes into a Hybrid Course

Hybrid courses, which are also called blended courses, present many advantages to both the institution and to the students. In a hybrid course some time on the physical campus is replaced by time in the learning management system. At my institution it usually works out to be a 50-50 arrangement. The institution gains valuable classroom space to deal with a burgeoning student population. Students love the apparent reduced time in a classroom seat.

However, a conversation that I have had many times with my colleagues is that reduced time on the physical campus should not equate to reduced overall learning time. The online portion of the class is not equal to homework. The online portion of the class should include real learning. There should be—and this is not an all-inclusive list—activities, discussions, interactive exercises, group work, etc. Online students should expect multimedia, announcements, and feedback.

For students, real learning is not just reading from the text or from the web, nor is it simply posting an answer to an assignment, nor is it taking an online quiz, exam or other assessment. The online portion of the class should be as dynamic and lively as the on-ground portion. In other words, the online portion of a class should be a class.

If all you need is static, one-way content, if all you need is to post homework, then I would assert that a hybrid course is not what you need. Keep the students in class for the full number of credit hours and supplement those hours with the online support materials you would like.