Instructors denied compensation for going beyond normal job duties

It’s all part of the job, a group of teachers at a northern Ontario college were told by an arbitrator.

At Sault College, based in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., three teachers requested (and were subsequently denied) additional compensation for the extra time they spent learning a college-wide learning module. The learning management software enabled teachers to post information such as notes, videos, grades and included email capability so students could communicate with their instructors.

Learning and implementing the new software was a mandatory requirement for all teachers at the college, which provided training sessions in the summer in order to have the program fully functional in time for the start of the fall semester.

The training was comprehensive, but not without its challenges (to which both parties attested). A two-day professional development session never materialized, training was delayed, and data was lost and had to be re-uploaded. That said, approximately 34 total training sessions were held for the 120 faculty members over the course of the summer.

As such, three teachers, Lorna Connolly-Beattie, Gabriella Doleske and Judi Gough filed a grievance alongside the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, saying that though they were only three, all 120 faculty should be compensated accordingly.

All three claimed they spent from one to 15 additional hours training on the new software.

"Despite the best efforts of the IT department, the rollout of the new program was not as smooth as had been anticipated," the union said, adding that the work required the teachers go "above and beyond their usual duties during their non-teaching time, and that they should be compensated for the time spent."

As OPSEU saw it, the collective agreement stipulated any work related to teaching undertaken by "mutual consent" would not be paid as long as it kept within the confines of professional responsibility. In this instance, that "mutual consent" was not present.

Rather, the union pointed to another clause, which said that atypical circumstances would warrant additional hours of pay on an hour-for-hour basis.

But Sault College argued that, in order for time to be attributed for such a case, there must be an assignment of particular work during the actual teaching period. Here, all training was assigned and completed before school started.

Further, nothing about the assignment could have been deemed "atypical."

"For an assignment to be atypical, it must be something unusual or different, and that was not the case here," the college said. "Rather, in this instance, all teachers were required to utilize a particular software system to deliver an educational component of the program."

In making her decision, arbitrator Tanja Wacyk determined that the teachers were adequately compensated for their training time – regardless of whether that took some teachers longer than others. The question, then, was whether the circumstances were "atypical."

"The functions of making course outlines available and distributing grades at the end of the course are clearly a consistent, integral part of teaching a course and part of the usual educational duties and responsibilities generally associated with a teaching position," Wacyk concluded. "The only thing different in this instance was the tool utilized to perform those functions – but the functions themselves remained the same."