| By Gale Staff |
Adjunct faculty are the backbone of many community colleges, yet the full scope of their work isn’t always fully appreciated.
Many juggle teaching full courseloads with tight deadlines, competing demands, and limited resources. It’s no wonder that 54% of community college faculty report burnout.
Still, instructors’ passion for education drives them to deliver the high-quality education community college students deserve—often without the same support as full-time faculty.
Gale Research Complete helps community colleges better support adjuncts with the most extensive collection of primary and secondary sources available to academic libraries today. The suite subscription includes access to 13 million pages of primary source content, over 17,000 peer-reviewed journals, and thousands of eBooks, so that part-time faculty can spend less time tracking down authoritative content and more time delivering exceptional instruction.
Let’s explore how Gale Research Complete lightens the load for adjuncts, allowing them to put their focus where it matters most: the classroom.
Affordable Access to Award-Winning Reference Material
One of the biggest hurdles to instruction is that materials are often scattered across different databases or libraries—or, even worse, locked behind paywalls. For community college faculty who need to cover a wide range of disciplines, this can directly limit their ability to prepare rich, varied lessons to meet students’ needs.
In addition to these challenges, many adjuncts rely on institutional libraries that may have limited budgets or outdated collections, offering only a fraction of what they need to create quality curricula. This constant need to search for supplemental materials elsewhere drains valuable prep time and can leave faculty feeling like they’re cobbling together a curriculum with whatever they can find.
For community colleges working with tight budgets, Gale’s subscription model makes it affordable to maintain access to a vast digital library of academic resources available in one easy-to-navigate, cross-searchable platform. Gale Research Complete includes an entire suite of dynamic databases:
- Gale Academic OneFile: Our premier periodical resource featuring millions of articles from more than 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative resources.
- Gale General OneFile: For general interest periodicals across a spectrum of topics, from agriculture to world history.
- Gale In Context: A media-rich hub of premier digital content in a subject-specific format.
- Gale Business: Insights: Comprehensive business insights that connect data to its practical applications.
- Gale Business: Entrepreneurship: Organizes content across four key business stages—plan, fund, start, and manage—to help users find success as entrepreneurs.
- Gale Health and Wellness: Reliable health information covering health and medicine; diseases and conditions; drugs; diagnostics and tests; and therapies, treatments, and surgeries.
- Gale Literature: Comprehensively covers literary commentary and criticism, biographical information, overviews, and reviews, as well as literary works and scholarly essays, providing the context of literary works and the careers of thousands of authors from all time periods and literary genres from around the world.
- Gale Literature Criticism: The largest, most extensive compilation of literary commentary available, spanning centuries of analysis.
- Gale Literature: Something About the Author: A critically acclaimed series featuring more than 28,000 entries about the lives and works of writers in the children and young adult genres.
- Gale Directory Library: Our collection of 23 directories essential for business research and marketing.
- Gale eBooks: Offers users a hassle-free eBook experience with comprehensive support from today’s top publishers, including ISTE, Learning Sciences International, Solution Tree Press, and more.
- Archives Unbound: Gale’s collection of historical records, particularly on U.S. foreign policy, U.S. civil rights, global affairs, colonial studies, and modern history.
The diversity and depth of these multi and interdisciplinary materials support adjunct teaching across subjects from history to business to nursing and more,
Efficient, Easy-to-User Search Functionality On a Single Platform
As every adjunct instructor will tell you, time is one of their most precious—and limited—resources.
Moreover, the challenge of vetting sources for quality and relevance can add another layer of difficulty. Without streamlined access to credible, peer-reviewed materials, adjuncts spend more time verifying sources than preparing lessons, hindering their ability to deliver timely content that meets their students’ needs.
With Gale Research Complete, those time-draining searches are a thing of the past. The platform brings everything together in one place, using a cross-search feature that pulls results from all available databases in a single step. No more jumping between systems or combing through endless lists! Instead, faculty can access materials with just a few clicks.
The search functions also feature advanced filter options that allow users to refine the results to a specific discipline or content type.
Built-In Tools to Engage Students’ Unique Learning Styles & Support Academic Needs
Community college students come from all walks of life, bringing strengths gained from diverse real-world experience, as well as a range of learning styles and needs. The challenge for adjunct faculty is to create a learning environment that effectively engages each student with flexible and accessible materials.
This is particularly important when working in a hybrid or online format, or adjunct professors risk alienating students who can’t necessarily access a particular file type due to their device or who need digital accommodations such as screen readers. Unlike many academic databases, which focus on a single media source—newspapers, scholarly journals, images, etc.—Gale Research Complete takes a more holistic approach, offering a range of multimedia resources that empower adjunct faculty to create dynamic, interactive lessons tailored to different learning styles.
In addition to the diversity of our material, we prioritize accessibility with translation capabilities in up to 50 languages and ReadSpeaker text-to-speech technology, which allows students to download audio files to their mobile devices and listen to content in nearly 25 languages.
ReadSpeaker is particularly appealing in community colleges, where the demographics include a higher rate of working adults, parents, and others who would benefit from the ability to continue their studies anytime, anywhere.
Access to On-Demand Professional Development Opportunities
The nature of adjunct work means professional development often takes a backseat. Faculty may lack the time or institutional support to explore new teaching methods or gain exposure to innovative research.
This disconnect can make staying current with academic trends or learning invaluable pedagogical insights harder, leaving faculty feeling stagnant in their approach to course planning and student engagement.
The Gale Support Training Center provides professional development for instructors through webinars, self-guided training modules, and instructional materials to help stay abreast of emerging research and sharpen instructional skills.
Training module collections are organized according to their associated product. Such an organizational structure means that adjunct faculty can dedicate as little as 15 minutes to a course and gain practical, actionable insights.
For example, the Archives Unbound training portal offers over a dozen webinars, tutorials, and guides, including “Gale Archives Unbound—For Higher Ed Users.” Similarly, the Gale Academic OneFile course includes “Gale Tools – Google Classroom Integration” and “Key Databases Every First-Year College Student Should Utilize – For Higher Ed Users” among nearly 50 training sessions.
These are just a small selection of Gale’s 1,000+ training tools, which are available in a range of different formats:
- Activities: Ready-to-implement assignments to help students develop critical research skills and/or explore a particular topic in-depth.
- Case studies: Real-world examples of Gale products in higher ed settings.
- Higher ed instructional tools: Teaching guides for college students on creating annotated bibliographies, conducting comparative literary analyses, and more.
- Professional development materials: Slide decks with instructions on using each Gale database product.
- Recorded webinars: An extensive collection of talks covering a range of subjects, from our 15 Minutes to Mastery Series to tips for engaging students with research materials.
- Resource guides: Gale database quick-start guides.
- Tip sheets: At-a-glance references for performing specific tasks.
- Tutorials: Information on using particular interfaces and functionality features.
- Upcoming webinars: Opportunities to join live professional development talks delivered by Gale experts.
Give Adjuncts the Tools to Deliver Impactful Instruction in Community College Classrooms
Unlike some instructional resources that require extensive, expensive training or provide knowledge that’s difficult to apply in the classroom, the databases available through Gale Research Complete are designed with immediate relevance in mind.
Adjunct faculty, already managing heavy workloads, can easily integrate our materials into their teaching for higher-quality pedagogy—no time-consuming prep time required.
Investing in Gale Research Complete means investing in your institution’s future. Contact us to learn more about how this powerful tool can help your community college, faculty, and students flourish.