NMC opens hiring of off-island faculty to teach courses online

The Northern Marianas College is now hiring faculty members who are located outside of the Commonwealth to teach courses at the college via the Internet.

College president Sharon Y. Hart confirmed with the Saipan Tribune just before her business trip last week that the college has hired for this semester a Florida-based instructor to teach a business management class online.

She did not identify the new faculty member but said that this person is being paid at the same rate as those who teach on campus.

“We have one faculty from as far away as Florida teaching an online course for us. [But] we are not paying more for an off-island [instructor],” she said.

NMC pays faculty members with bachelor’s degrees $500 per credit class. Those with master’s degrees get $700 per credit class.

According to Hart, it is NMC’s goal to increase the number of its online courses and that hiring qualified off-island faculty through the same process will open the door of opportunities for the college.

Hart assured that the hiring of the Florida-based instructor is in accordance with college policies.

“This is the beauty of online. We can hire folks from anywhere and everywhere and this is something we will continue to look at and explore,” she said.

She disclosed that the college is also looking at partnering with the University of North Dakota, which, according to Hart, has one of the most outstanding nursing programs in the country.

For many years now, NMC has been finding it difficult to hire more nursing instructors because they typically demand higher salaries and require certain educational background and experiences.

“If we have difficulty in finding faculty members for traditional courses [like nursing], we can partner with them and we can ask qualified faculty from there to teach our students [through online],” she said.

This method, she said, may free some nursing faculty of their workload and they could concentrate on clinical sessions, which are critical to the nursing program.

Just recently, Hart announced NMC’s partnership with ed2go, allowing the college to offer over 300 online courses.

Starting this spring semester, some non-instructional college employees had begun teaching classes within their 40-hour work schedule in order to save the college on costs.