The Invisible Technology Subsidy

At most institutions, knowing who you're teaching, communicating with them, and getting their grade onto a transcript requires the following:

• email
• online enrollment records



http://www.rexblog.com/2011/03/30/22872

• online final grade entry

Effective teaching also involves some or all of the following:

• use of an institution's course management system 
• online grading
• digital course material  
• Powerpoint or Prezi
• instruction in using the digital resources of the institution's library

Mind you, this is all specific to bricks-and-mortar classrooms, not online learning.  Students navigate a digital world with or without us, and some instructors go farther--keeping abreast of learning technology and finding innovative ways to use social media, online archives, and the like to get students engaged in the material.

And who pays for the equipment?

The growing minority of tenure-stream faculty may get funding to pay for the computers, software, dongles that make that digital activity possible; adjunct faculty generally, do not.  At best, they share a computer with other adjuncts in a shared office.  A laptop is not an optional luxury for most adjuncts: it's a vital professional tool, and it neither gets paid for by the institution nor is it eligible for technical support to make it easier to use the software and systems that the institution requires of its employees. In the building where I teach, the campus wifi is not supported in shared offices, so faculty have to decamp to a library or coffeeshop in order to email students or mount grades on the course management system.

Adjuncts teaching in these conditions can--and do!--deliver a 21st-century education, but they are subsidizing it with their own investments in the necessary technology.