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 Negotiating
the DistanceBargaining Contract and Policy Language for Community College Distance Education Programs Fall 2003
Introduction The NYSUT Community College Distance Education Committee (CCDEC), comprising representatives from State University of New York (SUNY) community colleges across the state, explores issues and concerns related to distance education. Our members range from novices to veterans, from cyberprofessors to skeptics. We teach fully asynchronous, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses and work at institutions that offer just a few online courses as well as at institutions that offer entire degrees online. We are educators who care deeply about how distance education affects teaching, learning, and research and who seek collegial methods to ensure that - above all else - a concern for high standards and quality education, not financial profit, drives distance education policies and practices in our locals. The NYSUT Community Colleges play a significant role in distance education in New York State. Community colleges, by their nature, are integral to the communities they serve and indispensable in providing access to higher education for a student population of great diversity. This especially holds true when national and state economic policies prompt substantial budget cuts to education. Distance education in New York is unique due to the presence of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN), an asynchronous learning network that connects online courses from the 64 SUNY campuses. In Fall 2002, 1,399 SUNY faculty members at their respective institutions offered 2,067 courses to 19,214 students, continuing SLN's presence as one of the largest distance education consortia in the world. While not all online courses in New York are offered through SLN, it is a major means of delivering online courses and will continue to grow in this capacity with SLN's recent release of its own course management system, CourseSpace, to accommodate hybrid and web-enhanced courses as well as fully asynchronous courses. Because of the uniqueness and continued growth of distance education in New York State, we have looked to the guidelines identified in the AFT Higher Education Department publication Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice (2000) to help guide our bargaining of distance education issues in our locals. The fourteen AFT guidelines of good practice are as follows:
Throughout this document, we highlight the many ways in which our NYSUT Community College bargaining units have implemented these AFT guidelines of good practice, and hope that it also serves to generate innovative ways to make these guidelines applicable to our institutions. Places at which these guidelines are reflected in discussion are noted with an AFT icon. We have subdivided this document into ten major bargaining issues. For each of these issues, we offer some statements of principle and rationale as well as sample contract and/or policy language from NYSUT Community College locals. We recognize that, while achieving strong language in our collective bargaining agreements affords the most protection, doing so may take time. If some of the language discussed below cannot be achieved in the next round of contract negotiations, we strongly recommend that the language be pursued as college-wide policy, which is the next best protection. In fact - in order to ensure high quality distance education programs - we feel that knowledgeable bargaining unit members, especially distance education practitioners, should be integrally involved in as many aspects of college-wide governance, policy, and union decision-making bodies as possible. The statements of principle discussed are meant to serve as guidelines or recommendations, and the sample contract language illustrates various ways that locals have negotiated language to keep control in the hands of the faculty. We must remind readers, however, that this reflects negotiated rather than ideal language. Finally, as appropriate, we have annotated the sample language with commentary on issues that require extra attention.
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