Michael T. Bradley is a full-time online- only professor. In the virtual classroom of his “World Religion and Introduction to Ethics” classes at Georgia Perimeter College, a two-year college in suburban Atlanta, Bradley employs a teaching style that both personalizes him to his students and encourages them to interact with one another.
Bradley also narrates video clips on lecture topics and assigns “self field-trip” special projects such as having the students observe religious ceremonies and then writing a narrative report about their experience.
“My teaching environment is different than the classroom setting, but the goals are the same: maximize the student’s educational experience,” says Bradley.
Bradley has been teaching online full time for three years and has served as an adjunct professor since 1991. What makes him unique among online-only professors across the country is that he’s on a tenure-track. Bradley is one of three professors who are part of a new program instituted this fall at GPC where full-time online-only professors achieve tenure under the same conditions as classroom professors. That means teaching for five years at the rank of assistant professor, or higher, before being eligible to apply for tenure. The professor then is evaluated by a series of committees for his teaching effectiveness, service and professional accomplishments related to school.
“The online-only tenure track program allows us to develop a core group of professors who are experts not only in the discipline they are teaching, but also in teaching in the online medium itself, says Dr. Mark Griffin, executive director for GPC online. “The tenured professors then can mentor full- and part-time faculty about available resources for online education. It strengthens the overall instruction in the online environment.”
Griffin says the school has seen a 40 percent annual increase for each of the past two years for online enrollment. GPC first began offering online classes in 1998, and within two years the college had expanded its online offering to 39 courses. For the Fall 2008 semester, the college’s online program enrolled approximately 6,000 students in over 500 different courses, according to Debi Moon, former assistant vice president for education affairs at GPC, who was involved in the creation and selection process for the online tenure track program. In the Fall of 2009 the college will hire full-time chairs for each online department.
