Twenty years ago, had I been asked to name the doings of my future self, I would not have been able to envision the fall I’ve just been through. Concurrent with beginning this Master of Education program (though entirely unplanned and on a three-day turnaround while camping with my family in Saskatchewan), I also started teaching part time on a probationary contract at an online school for my local school board. My experience with online teaching has spanned a dozen years now, but this is only my fourth foray into actual contracted employment as a teacher — everything else was either as a substitute teacher or where I was technically considered self-employed. The previous three contracts were to fill a maternity leave (a duration of less than three months); a single fall semester, COVID-19-related part-time assignment for a board 500km away; and a summer school position this July for a fully established board for whom I’ve been working since 2016 (which makes it feel like coming home).

Having myself been a student in an asynchronous distance/fledgling online learning program (when I was in the eleventh grade, prior to the turn of the millennium), and having chosen as a parent to have our three children in a synchronous online program in 2020-21 (developed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore not remote emergency teaching), and given my previous experiences teaching online, my current assignment surprised me by the level of angst it has wrought in my life.

What I have been finding in my current position is that the amount of work does not line up at all with the FTE I’m contracted at. I also recognize that teaching as a profession holds many idiosyncrasies and archaic holdovers that other businesses in modern times would (in my estimation at least) never tolerate. However, when all is said and done, I am floundering in my attempts to meet all the responsibilities foisted upon me within the hours I’ve been told are mine to work. And my comment on this has perpetually been that it is the students who lose. And that is egregiously shameful.

Given online learning is my area of interest, it was the topic of the research project I did (along with a partner) for the project in EDCI 571. While gathering literature, I ran across references to other studies of online learning and teaching in K-12 in Canada, and this caught my attention. I began delving into and reading what I could find relating to online teaching, the roles of an online teacher (compared to a course designer or a course manager), and most tellingly, about the lack of specific parameters around how an online teacher’s workload is determined (Barbour, 2017).

Since my biggest pique right now is related to my workload compared to my officially designated work hours (in other words, conditions of practice), and since there is a lack of definition relating to online teaching in the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) collective agreements with nearly all school boards in the province, I am very interested in collecting information relating to the workload, hours, and FTE of online teachers in the province of Alberta.

From the 2020 – 2024 Central Table Settlement I found the Letter of Understanding X: Distributed Education Conditions of Practice (Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association | Alberta.Ca, n.d.) to be particularly concise in naming many of my current areas of concern and frustration. It reads, in part:

  • School divisions and the ATA may agree locally to establish pilot projects for distributed education conditions of practice during the term of the agreement. Such projects may include provisions related to:
    • The number of students, credits, courses or subject areas a teacher may be assigned;
    • The amount of course design and development expected of a teacher;
    • Class composition and complexity in the distributed education environment;
    • The amount of non-instructional time that may be assigned to distributed education teachers;
    • Appropriate processes and considerations when students do not complete the attempted course;
    • Processes and timing for enrolling students in courses or programs.

In an initial brainstorming session, I had already determined to ask questions relating to some of the following items:

  • AB certified teacher
  • online
  • define – past or current
  • years experience (online)
  • courses taught (list) JH vs SH (core/options)
  • FTE designation
  • official hours a week designation
  • number of students (ranges?) for both JH and SH
  • synchronous/asynchronous
  • average hours of synchronous group scheduled instruction per week per core class
  • course content quality (scanned from PDFs/text/print-based distance modules vs. optimized for online learning)
  • course development responsibility falls to whom
  • estimation of hours needed beyond assigned time
  • assessment supervision (remote vs in-person vs assigned to designated person vs none)
  • division/school directed PD specific to online (y/n)
  • if yes, # of times
  • training specific to being hired for online? (y/n)

One of the significant considerations of my survey, based on the topic of my questions, was that participants’ privacy be of the utmost importance. Anonymity is needed, and so I did not ask for email, school, or district names, and I made sure to select the anonymous response option within SurveyMonkey.

In putting this survey together, I did minor research into question structures, SurveyMonkey navigation options, and wording choice. I also utilized ChatGPT to suggest a logical split of the statements for the rating-scale items into two groups, which make up the final two questions of my survey.

The survey itself is here: FTE and Teaching Online in Alberta

When I built my survey initially, I used logic to disqualify respondents based on “no” responses to the first three questions on the first page. However, since the majority of my peers are in B.C., I needed to remove that logic, so that they would be able to navigate through the full survey and have an opportunity to answer all questions. This was critical to my receiving feedback from my cohort, which I’m sharing verbatim:

  • “Just did it very straightforward and quick to complete! I have no feedback other than great work”
  • “Did your survey Krista. Bc doesn’t have any language around online learning either, I’d say open it up so it’s not specific to Alberta.”
    • My reply: I removed the logic that I’d put on the first three questions (so that it doesn’t just boot you out). But I specified Alberta since these questions are driven from my current position and frustrations around the conditions of practice, and focusing on other teachers in online in Alberta gives me greater clout as it were to argue that change is needed. (Or maybe I’ll find that I’m the one living the dream…)
  • “Graham here – I think your survey is very important for online teachers in AB. One issue is with your “strongly agree” section – it seems that I can only select each option once. Meaning, I’m only allowed to strongly agree with 1 of those statements. I really like the questions you asked and I believe that the information you gather will be meaningful. Side note – I’m also interested in polling teachers. I’m working on a questionnaire for the second assignment in 515. Maybe you could take a look at it later. Have a great holiday!! Well done!!”
  • “Questions 14 and 15 only let you answer one of the subquestions, maybe it needs to seperated into other sections?”
    • My reply: I need to fix that! Graham noticed the same thing and I know exactly which button I pushed without fully exploring its implications!

As I neared the completion of building my survey, I realized that it may have been helpful to have read chapters 7 and 8 (I’ve only gotten partially into 7) prior to putting the survey together. On the other hand, I have taught Math 9 several times, and part of the curriculum covers the creation and execution of studies to collect data. Coupled with that, I feel that my propensity for writing is a gift which made this survey-creation task into a relatively straightforward process.

One other thing which I neglected to address in my survey, and which occurred to me afterwards, is that most teachers will have taught online at some point due to COVID-19 shutdowns. Remote Emergency Teaching is NOT what I wanted to collect data on! Without specifying this, I run the danger of having teachers respond based on pandemic style online experiences, which could affect the validity of my results.

If I were to do other survey work, I would be interested in using Google Forms, since I’ve used it before, and my previous experiences have shown it to be a vastly more user-friendly platform when it comes to differentiating paths through a survey. However, I am not sure how difficult a Likert-scale type question is to build in Forms. If it is a complicated process, that could be a drawback. I’m also not sure if it is possible for Google Forms responses to be displayed graphically and analyzed quite as simply as they are in SurveyMonkey.

Finally, in reviewing surveys of cohort members I realize that I really like the format of one question per page. It would be a change that I would very seriously consider implementing if (when) I send my own survey out to collect actual data for research.

Bibliography

Barbour, M. K. (2017). Working Conditions for K-12 Distance & Online Learning Teachers in Canada. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20409.67684

Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association | Alberta.ca. (n.d.). Retrieved December 21, 2023, from https://www.alberta.ca/teachers-employer-bargaining-association

Feature image by Nabeel Hussain on Unsplash

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