The Bandit Guide
to Teaching Online

Teaching as a contract instructor in online distance-education programs isn't a second-tier job anymore. We used to think of it as the bumpy back road to limited academic opportunities in higher education and a dead end for tenure prospects; now we see that it's a feeder lane to the intellectual interstate system.

As much as the increase in teaching by contract knowledge workers is conventionally lamented as a bad, bad thing (the imprecation being that these are the lesser specimens of homo academicus), universities and colleges are hiring more and more of them. But the independent instructor is in truth a fine thing, attracting discerning students to lively courses. Students value teaching by engaged instructors not preoccupied with committee responsibilities or facing an institutional imperative to publish or perish on schedule. Administrators save on program costs.

Runners in a bandit marathon complete the distance on their own or with the assistance of whatever crew they can muster. The bandit relies on their own skill and resourcefulness and owes their success to this. Applied to online instructors working on contract, the concept implies independence, swift-footedness, the achievement of goals in surprising ways.

The Bandit Guide proposes that in the digital age the prospect of tenure is not necessary for an online instructor to attain all of the meaningful career milestones of a traditional on-campus academic life, including a doctoral degree, participation in conferences and symposia, and scholarly publication. This is intended to be a useful handbook for any doctoral candidate or instructor in the humanities or social sciences who anticipated following a tenure-track path to a university teaching career, and who finds that the route isn't turning that way.

Paula Humfrey has studied at Canadian, American, and British universities, taught in both Canada and the US, and published with Canadian, American, and UK publishers.