Online Course Platforms Offer Paid Freelance Gigs to Professors

As online courses multiply outside the formal structures of academe, professors increasingly have opportunities to earn cash on the side by freelancing.

Udemy, an online-education company, offers anyone, including professors, the chance to design and teach an online course. Instructors set the prices for their courses, which tend to run from about $30 to $100 per student, and take home 70 percent of the revenue.

The company’s latest recruiting strategy is to enter new instructors in a contest in which one of them will win $5,000 and the right to keep 100 percent of the revenue from his or her course for as long as the professor continues to teach it.

Udemy is just one of several options for professors who want to make money on freelance gigs. StraighterLine, a company that offers courses that are accepted for credit at some colleges, lets professors set a “premium” fee for certain courses—some amount above the company’s prescribed base price—and pocket the difference.

Udacity, one of the “big three” MOOC providers, also recruits individual faculty members and pays them a flat rate of $5,000 to $10,000 per course.

In response to that proliferation of freelance opportunities, some universities have begun to write new rules for their professors’ extracurricular teaching. For example, the University of Pennsylvania has long required that professors dedicate themselves, first and foremost, to Penn; however, the university has been willing to permit faculty members to pursue freelance gigs that do not compete with Penn’s offerings.

In the past, a noncredit online course did not fall into that category. But, with the arrival of massive open online courses and the emergence of the Web as a mainstream medium for instruction, things are changing at places like Penn. The university is now drafting guidelines to govern conflicts of interest in this new era, and the new rules could limit professors’ ability to avail themselves of freelance opportunities.

“Whether or not the university’s online programs are intended to or do produce revenues,” Penn administrators wrote in a working draft of the new guidelines, “the university may decide that parallel activities that faculty members propose to conduct outside the university would compete or conflict with university initiatives and may deny permission for such activities on that basis.”

American University recently clarified its own policy on what its professors may not do with respect to online teaching. In a memorandum to faculty members this month, Scott A. Bass, the provost, said professors were not allowed to teach online courses that charge fees to students; nor may they grade the work of online students or award certificates of achievement outside their duties with American.

Udemy says such policies have not yet posed a problem for its recruiting. “We’ve encountered this only once or twice in the many conversations/interactions we’ve had with professors,” said Shannon Hughes, the company’s senior director of instructor marketing, in an e-mail.