Survey on Desire for Online Teaching

Dear online phd students,

I would like to know how many of you, if any, would be interested in teaching for Texas Tech in some online, lower-division offerings we’re thinking of offering, beginning in the next 6-18 months. This email is not an offer, of course, but I’m trying to get a sense of how many people might be interested. The specifics are unknown, but I would imagine the pay would be something like $2000-$3000 per class and that you would NOT have to be a GPTI (and encounter the 9-hour registration rule). I also do not know if taking on such a job would grant tuition and/or fee waivers for non-Texas residents. I also do not know what sort of policy we’d employ to select online instructors, but I’m certain that you’d need to be ABD, holding no incompletes, and having the “OK” from your dissertation committee. I would also imagine that you would have had to take a pedagogy course (whether with us or via transfer is undetermined at the moment) and that you’d need to be supervised by a TTU professor during the tenure of your job and spend some of your time in May for training, assessment, and that sort of thing. I don’t think this kind of job would require you to quit your day job, but (especially for state of Texas employees) it might constitute some sort of contractual conflict with your employer. We envision the job to be supplementary to your day job.

So you can see that there is no policy in place, but quite a lot of movement towards something that would be very nice to be able to offer to you. What I’d like to learn from you is whether you would apply for such a position. I realize the easy answer for everyone is “yes” because there are no risks to saying ‘no,’ but I encourage you to answer as if you were applying for the position — good data about the likely numbers of potential instructors from your program is going to be very important as we take this concept further.

All of these caveats said, let me ask you to reply to me (not to the list) at joyce.carter@ttu.edu if this type of job is something you’d apply for if we began offering it in the next year or two. If you can’t, you don’t have to write me anything. All I’m trying to do is get a sense of the percentage of online doctoral students who might seek this sort of support.

Many thanks for your participation at this very, very busy time of year,

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Fees vs. Tuition for non-resident online doctoral students

To whom it may concern,

Students in Texas Tech’s online doctoral program who are non-Texas residents are billed a particular way, and this way was dictated by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) when the program was approved in 2004. Instead of tuition, which the THECB wants to apply to in-state students and on-campus non-resident students, these online non-residents are billed a special instruction fee called Distance Ed Instruction Fee for more or less the amount of out-of-state tuition. At the same time, these students’ out-of-state tuition is waived so that the net effect is a fee bill that looks exactly the same as any other non-resident doctoral student attending classes on-campus without other fee or tuition waivers.

Regardless of what the fee bill itemized line says, this special instruction fee should be treated as tuition for these students. If you have any questions about this program or its fees and tuition, please don’t hesitate to write joyce.carter@ttu.edu or call 806.742.2500 #237.

Sincerely yours,
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Joyce Locke Carter, Ph.D.
Director of Graduate Studies, TCR
Texas Tech University
Box 43091
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
ph: (806) 742-2501 #247 fax: 806-742-0989
program information: http://www.english.ttu.edu/tcr