US: For-profit breaks mould of part-time staff

Professors at online colleges in the US can be an anonymous, itinerant bunch, moonlighting as adjuncts from far-flung locales and often struggling to cobble together a teaching load that can pay the bills, writes Paul Fain for Inside Higher Ed. Breaking this mould are 98 newly minted online faculty members at Grand Canyon University. The for-profit Christian university hired them as full-time employees, and they get standard benefits packages that are not available to part-timers.

The group works weekdays from noon to 20h00, reporting for duty at two administrative buildings in Phoenix, near the university's campus. Full-time teaching gigs are rare in online higher education, which has a business model built on cheap labour with flexible hours. But Grand Canyon bets that having a cadre of long-term online professors will prove a competitive advantage.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site