The 2025 Fall term has raced by, AND you have never felt so overwhelmed with work, right? You are not alone. I hear from a surprising number of you. For some, it is the unexpected uptick in workload after a promotion. The surprising "7 days a week" attitude as you move up the administrative ladder is common. But the most common complaint is that the workload continues to increase – more online sections to serve more online students – and the need to train and support more online faculty, with no additional budget or staffing. Sadly, that too is VERY common.

We are, after all, unicorns. The administrative and staff roles of a Distance Learning program are still rather undefined. We don't really fit in the organizational chart either. We seemingly support everyone in academics and work with everyone in administration. We are NOT a silo operation; quite the contrary, we are everything, everywhere, all at once.

We’ve discussed before the profound impact of The Pandemic on our community college online programs. I’ve had numerous conversations with administrators, designers and faculty – all have shared the trauma of the rapid full shift to online, the lack of staff and training to facilitate this, and the overwhelming day-after-day workload this represented. 

We are now “years” away from The Pandemic, but a variety of stress points are still present in our online programs. Specifically, the shift to fully online led to an increase in the number of faculty that wanted to teach online (it also increased the number of students as well). This fostered greater demand BUT our programs have not experienced increases in staffing, and especially have not been able to increase the number of instructional designers needed to address chronic issues with our online classes. Chronic issues????  Yes, for most of use, our online classes lack consistency, often are not compliance checked (ADA), are woefully lacking the benefits of professional design, and many of our faculty lack the training needed to create a learning experience that is engaging and embraces the unique needs of learning online. As a result, we have actually witnessed a decline in online student learning experience and completions.