Summary and Conclusions

Chapter 5

Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations

Introduction

Distance education has expanded nearly every community college in the country. This chapter will summarize the purpose of this study and the main study question. It will then put the contract terms into the structure of a policy framework. Finally, it will review conclusions and make recommendations for future research.

Summary

The purpose of this study was to identify the distance education terms typically found in the negotiated faculty contracts for community colleges. A review of the literature sought to examine the place of distance education in the contracts of community college faculty. It began with an exploration of distance education, its definition, history, benefits and questions of quality. It then explored community colleges and their general role in higher education. Next, it reviewed the literature of distance instruction, including activities generally involved in distance instruction, faculty workload, faculty incentives and institutional support of distance instruction. Finally, the literature review explored negotiated agreements, their history, terms and general information about faculty contracts.

The literature suggested that distance education, though it has been a part of higher education for over a century, is still thought of as new. The research on distance education is still developing and colleges are still in the early stages of determining how to manage distance education activities on campus.

The study reviewed 185 of the 378 two-year college agreements in the Spring 2007 Higher Education Contract Analysis System (HECAS) database. Contracts which expired prior to 2007 were omitted and 85 contracts were reviewed for distance education related terms and coded accordingly. Thirty-one categories of distance education terms eventually emerged from the contracts. The categories were checked against contract term recommendations by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The older contracts were then reviewed and some were integrated into the pool, for a total of 130 contracts.

The method for this study was qualitative description, a method which seeks to describe current phenomena. The analysis was conducted using content analysis, an examination of the manifest content of a document. Qualitative description has been described as a crude form of inquiry and “less sexy” than other methods of qualitative research (Sandelowski, 2000). However, it is the most appropriate method for this study and contributes to its significance. This researcher found that many people in higher education were unaware that distance education terms actually exist in faculty contracts, let alone that they exist in relatively significant numbers. This descriptive study brings to light that which has been hidden and provides data that will be useful to both sides of the negotiating table.

Distance Education Terms in Faculty Contracts by Stephanie Delaney, JD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.