Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

Online learning has caused a seismic shift in higher Education since its rise beginning at the turn of the century. A portion of that impact has been on the ascent of the part-time employee teaching online. Adjunct instructors account for the overwhelming majority of the faculty providing Education to these online learners. Because an instructors performance impacts students learning and their resulting end of course evaluation has such a bearing upon that persons employment, it is imperative to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) of employees teaching online. The problem addressed by this study was to determine the factors that affected a part-time online employees performance rating by their students within a higher Education setting. More specifically, this study sought to identify key performance indicators for those teaching online part-time. Correlations and regression were conducted on institutional data covering 1295 fully online courses that occurred in 2016 at a regionally-accredited, private university. Potential key performance indicators studied were faculty threads posted per week, faculty employment longevity, faculty load, average course GPA, and class size. Three of those variables were statistically significant (p < 0.001) in individual correlations to an adjuncts End of Course Survey score. Four of those factors were statistically significant (p < 0.001) in predicting students satisfaction of a part-time employee teaching online. The key performance indicators of part-time employees teaching online include faculty threads posted per week, faculty load, average course GPA, and class size. Implications and ideas for future research were discussed.

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