More work for less reward: Academic perceptions of service teaching

Service teaching, through which core courses or modules are provided by a department other than the one administering the degree, occurs in universities worldwide, but there have been many reports of student dissatisfaction with their service-taught courses. The experiences of service teachers have received little attention and may help to suggest strategies for improvement, so we surveyed service and discipline teachers from the science departments/faculties at Australian universities for their perceptions of the difficulty, the effect on the likelihood of promotion, and qualifications needed, for each type of teaching. Both service and discipline teachers perceived service teaching to be significantly more difficult, yet significantly less valuable for promotion, than discipline teaching. More research is needed to investigate whether these perceptions reflect the realities of service teaching because, if they do, they will have implications for university policies and workload models.