All of the Responsibilities, None of the Fun

Since I started my "job" as online instructor I have realized that this function has several inherent problems, particularly for an academic like me who has spent many years working on my degree.

First, I was disappointed to see that only one other colleague in my training class had a PhD (in history, at ACLA no less). She she is a woman from India -- an expatriate like me -- who does not want to pursue an academic career and will go into library science. There was another colleague pursuing a Ph.D. online (he's a Broadway actor, much younger than I). Most other folks hold Master's degrees of various kinds. This already demonstrates that pursuing such an unconventional professional direction is not really something that people with my academic formation are doing, which is quite discouraging -- in spite of the fact of the encouragement I received from one of the members of my PhD committee. I have to deal with my own prejudice and conflicted feelings about a for-profit educational enterprise.

The main problem, however, is that in this particular function, I have all the responsibilities and duties inherent to teaching -- communicating with the students about their role in the class, grading a lot of work, giving students feedback, answering questions, etc. However, it has none of the "fun" of designing a class, selecting readings, elaborating the syllabus, thinking of discussion questions, designing assignments, all of that is taken away from the "instructor." The only things I get to elaborate are some of the grading rubrics, posts in response to my students discussions, and student feedback and grading.

Besides, I have strict deadlines for participation in the discussions, responding to student questions (no more than 24h after the question is asked -- that means that I'm constantly "on call"), and grading assignments. For grading, the deadlines go from 48h to 7 days, and that, my friends is beyond overwhelming. If one takes as long to grade as I've been taking, it becomes a nightmare. And, consequently, if I were to calculate how much I am making, I think that there are some days in which my pay would amount to 3 bucks an hour, if not less. Not fun! Not fair! I should have actually titled the post like this:

"All of the Responsibilities, None of the Fun, Very Little Pay"

Yeah, so I think I have ample reasons to be overwhelmed and frustrated by this. But I still enjoy the interaction with students. I just wish I could grade more than 4 papers an hour and still give them enough feedback and feel that I'm giving fair grades. :-(