involve a review of the hiring packet and transcripts. The Office of Online Education maintains records of transcript reviews and course qualifications for online faculty.
Adjunct faculty are considered part-time employees of the University. The Office of Online Education assigns online course load to adjunct faculty as needed. As much as possible, course load assignments consider the requests and preferences of each adjunct faculty member. In some circumstances, an adjunct faculty member might be asked to complete additional duties beyond the scope of their part-time teaching load, such as administrative support of the online programs, service as an SME, or curricular assessment. Other assigned duties are tracked by the Office of Online Education. Adjuncts are compensated for additional duties per the established rates. See Section 2.3 –Faculty Compensation.
Adjunct faculty are not hourly employees of the University. They are paid a flat rate per course and other duties. However, to comply with regulations relevant to the part-time status of adjunct faculty members and benefits administration, the university will use adjunct faculty workload information to track adjunct hours of service.
The term adjunct hours of service refers to the average calculated time per week a part-time adjunct faculty employee works. Since adjunct faculty are part-time employees, adjunct hours of service must be tracked to confirm that their workloads, in fact, remain below a calculated average of 30 hours per week, which is the threshold for full-time employment under the Affordable Care Act.
The method of calculating adjunct hours of service must fit the definition of a “reasonable method.”23 One reasonable method is described in the Federal Register:
[T]he Treasury Department and the IRS have determined that, until further guidance is issued, one (but not the only) method that is reasonable for this purpose would credit an adjunct faculty member of an institution of higher education with (a) 2 1/4 hours of service (representing a combination of teaching or classroom time and time performing related tasks such as class preparation and grading of examinations or papers) per week for each hour of teaching or classroom time (in other words, in addition to crediting an hour of service for each hour teaching in the classroom, this method would credit an additional 1 1/4 hours for activities such as class preparation and grading) and, separately, (b) an hour of service per week for each additional hour outside of the classroom the faculty member spends performing duties they are required to perform (such as required office hours or required attendance at faculty meetings).24
Three timeframes are involved in tracking adjunct hours of service: the stability period, the administrative period, and the measurement period.
23 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2014-03082/p-72
24 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2014-03082/p-77
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Commented [JM41]: This will require the load policy to have a crosswalk from equivalent teaching units for standard non-teaching assignments.