The Compliance Trap: Don’t Paint Good Teaching into a Corner

Tony Sovak, Ph.D. Director, LMS and eLearning Quality, Pima Community College

The other day I saw a road sign that said, “Stop for children in crosswalk,” and my first reaction was to quote Professor Snape, in all his eye-roll glory: “Obviously.” Because why would any rational person need to be told that?

The sign resonated with me because it echoed a familiar refrain in my work as the Director of eLearning Quality. The question I hear most often isn’t whether something matters, but where is it written?

Some expectations feel obvious. In an online class, dates should reflect the current term. The gradebook should be used in every course. Others, like making time to meet synchronously with online students upon request, feel less self-evident. But eventually the same question always comes up: where is it written?

And in academic environments, that question makes sense. Writing something down is often what turns it into recognized work. It’s how expectations become visible, how labor becomes legible, and how responsibilities become something people can be held to or protected by.

Folks in roles like mine, who get to see a wide range of practices across divisions and disciplines, can usually tell what’s working and what isn’t. We can see the patterns. We can point out examples and try to encourage and spread those practices.

And that works—for a while. It works with early adopters, and with those who already believe in the value of the work and have the time or support to try something new.

But at a certain point, if you want those practices to take hold at scale, across an entire institution, they must become policy. And that’s where the problem starts. There’s something about codifying good practice into policy that can sometimes paint us into a corner.

But if we aren’t careful in the shift from the singular to the scalable, the move from intention to implementation can quietly pave over the very things we care most about.

“Teaching asks faculty to leave their imposter syndrome behind and put themselves on the line. It requires expertise, presence, performance and care, all at once.”

When we talk with students about their most successful online classes, they describe a familiar pattern. Small, spontaneous moments of interaction—videos recorded in an art studio, at a dry-erase board working through a math problem, or via screen capture while a professor talks through a student’s ideas. What they point to, repeatedly, is presence.

The trouble starts when we try to turn those examples into rules. When we say, this is what good presence looks like, it’s tempting to follow that with a specific tool and number and maybe map it to a national standard (like Regular and Substantive Interaction). Next thing you know, every online professor needs to do two 45 minutes recorded live office hours, whether any student attends or not. The result is often faculty teaching to empty Zoom rooms twice a week—hitting record, checking a box, and burning time that could have gone to innovation or passion.

It turns out the impetus matters. When faculty choose to make a video because it serves a real instructional purpose, the result is often thoughtful and effective. When video becomes a requirement, it quickly becomes a compliance metric. The same recording, repeated week after week. Twenty minutes of talking to no one. Presence without connection.

And that’s the failure mode: compliance without care. The form remains, but the thing students valued quietly disappears.

And that raises a question I keep coming back to. Where does the pressure for hard rules, bright lines, and specific numbers come from? It isn’t always driven by some distant administrative mandate. In my experience, quality systems that were designed to allow for flexibility, professional judgment, and disciplinary differences meet the strongest push for specific measurable criteria from department heads and faculty themselves. They ask for clear counts, exact thresholds, and unambiguous rules.

Ambiguity is hard to enforce. When expectations feel uneven, accountability becomes difficult. In those moments, a hard metric can start to feel like the only path forward.

Teaching asks faculty to leave their imposter syndrome behind and put themselves on the line. It requires expertise, presence, performance and care, all at once. There is something deeply personal involved in that work. It’s not an accident that quality frameworks focus almost entirely on course design rather than faculty practice. Design is safer. It’s much easier to point to a checklist than to have a difficult and messy conversation with your colleagues about something so personal.

But sometimes we need to get messy. Because the uncomfortable truth is that practice matters too. Presence matters. And those are exactly the conversations institutions are often least willing to have openly, even though students need us to have them, especially if we want to show up for them at scale.