Western Governors University is one of the most consequential organisational experiments in modern higher education, and its most radical feature is not its technology or its price but the way it reorganises the faculty role itself. At almost every traditional university, a single professor designs the course, teaches it, mentors students, and grades their work — four functions fused into one job. WGU pulls those functions apart and assigns each to a specialist. Understanding this "disaggregated" or "unbundled" faculty model matters for any academic thinking about where the profession is heading.
This overview is written for academic staff and leaders anywhere — whether you are curious about alternative models, considering a role in an unbundled institution, or interested in what your own university might borrow. The model raises real questions about identity, autonomy, and quality that every academic should think through. For related organisational and leadership topics, see our Leadership, Service & Committees collection.
Western Governors University in brief
WGU is a private, non-profit, fully online university founded in 1997 by a group of US state governors who wanted a scalable, affordable way to expand access to higher education. It is regionally accredited, enrols hundreds of thousands of students, and awards degrees primarily in business, information technology, health and nursing, and teacher education. Its two defining design choices are competency-based progression — students advance by demonstrating mastery rather than by accumulating seat time — and a flat, subscription-style tuition model that lets motivated students accelerate to reduce cost.
These design choices are not cosmetic; they force the faculty reorganisation. If students progress at their own pace by demonstrating competencies rather than sitting in synchronised classes, the traditional professor-teaches-a-cohort model simply does not fit. There is no lecture hall, no shared semester rhythm, and often no cohort at all. The institution had to invent a different way to deploy academic expertise, and the disaggregated faculty model is the answer it built. You can read WGU's own account of its structure and accreditation at wgu.edu.
The disaggregated faculty model
The core idea is simple and, to traditional academics, unsettling: the bundle of tasks that constitute "being a professor" are separated and assigned to different specialised roles. Course design is done centrally by teams of academics and instructional designers who build a course once, at scale, for all students. Ongoing student support and mentoring is a distinct role. Subject-matter teaching and tutoring is another. Assessment and grading is handled by separate evaluators who never taught the student, which is argued to increase objectivity. No single person owns a student's entire experience of a course.
The rationale is specialisation and scale. Rather than expecting every academic to be simultaneously an excellent curriculum designer, an engaging teacher, a supportive mentor, and a fair assessor — a rare combination — the model lets each person do the one thing they are best at, for many more students than a traditional professor could serve. Proponents argue this raises quality in each function and lowers cost; critics argue it fragments the holistic relationship between teacher and student that they see as the heart of education. Both are describing the same real trade-off, and which side you land on says a lot about what you believe teaching fundamentally is.
Program mentors, course instructors and evaluators
In practice the model resolves into several distinct academic roles. Program mentors are assigned to a student for their whole degree and are the relationship anchor — they guide the student's overall progress, motivation, and pacing across the entire programme, functioning as a cross between an academic advisor and a coach. This continuity is WGU's answer to the criticism that unbundling destroys the student relationship: the mentor provides the sustained human connection, even though they are not teaching specific course content.
Course instructors, by contrast, are subject-matter experts attached to particular courses who provide on-demand teaching and tutoring when a student needs help with the content. Evaluators are faculty who assess student work — the performance tasks, projects, and demonstrations through which competency is proven — against detailed rubrics, working separately from those who taught the material. Each role is a genuine academic job requiring disciplinary expertise, but each is narrower and more specialised than a traditional lectureship, with the workload structured around large numbers of students rather than a handful of classes. Modelling that kind of high-volume, role-specific workload is exactly the problem AcademicStaff's workload calculator is designed to help institutions and staff reason about honestly.
Governance and academic leadership at WGU
Disaggregation reshapes academic governance as much as it reshapes teaching. Because courses are built centrally by teams rather than owned by individual instructors, curriculum decisions are made at the programme and college level through structured design processes involving faculty, instructional designers, assessment specialists, and industry advisors. This is a very different distribution of academic authority from the traditional model, where individual professors hold considerable autonomy over their own courses. At WGU, that autonomy is traded for consistency and scale, with academic quality managed through the design process and continuous data rather than through individual instructor discretion.
Academic leadership therefore concentrates in programme and assessment design and in the councils that set competency standards, often with heavy input from employers to ensure graduates meet workforce needs. For academics used to departmental self-governance, this can feel like a loss of the collegial control that defines traditional universities — the kind of committee-based deliberation we discuss in running inclusive committees. Whether the trade is worthwhile depends on your values: WGU argues that structured, data-informed design produces more consistent quality than variable individual autonomy, while critics see the erosion of academic self-governance as a genuine cost.
What the model means for an academic career
For an individual academic, an unbundled institution offers a different kind of career with real advantages and real limits. The advantages include focus — you can be excellent at the one function you love, whether that is mentoring students, teaching content, or designing curriculum, without being forced to be adequate at all four. Many academics find the mentoring or teaching-focused roles more sustainable and rewarding than the sprawling, everything-at-once traditional job. The roles are often more flexible and location-independent, which widens access to academic work for people whom the traditional campus model excludes.
The limits matter too. Traditional academic identity fuses teaching and research; most unbundled roles are teaching-and-support only, with little or no research component, which does not suit everyone and may not translate back easily to research-intensive institutions. Career progression follows a different ladder than the tenure track, and the specialisation that makes the work sustainable can also feel narrowing over time. Anyone weighing such a role should think honestly about which functions of academic work they most value, using the kind of self-assessment we describe in building academic influence, and whether a specialised role serves the career they want.
Lessons other institutions are borrowing
Whatever one thinks of WGU wholesale, traditional universities are increasingly borrowing pieces of the model. The separation of course design from teaching is spreading as institutions build large online programmes with instructional-design teams. Dedicated student-success and mentoring roles, distinct from teaching faculty, are now common across the sector as universities take retention seriously. Independent or blind assessment to improve grading objectivity appears in many quality frameworks. Each of these is a fragment of disaggregation adopted without embracing the whole.
The deeper lesson is that the fused professor role is a historical convention, not a law of nature, and that its functions can be recombined in response to scale, cost, and access pressures that every system faces — including the fast-growing higher-education sectors of India, Nigeria, and across Africa and Asia, where the demand for affordable, scalable models is most acute. Studying WGU is less about copying it than about recognising that the shape of the academic job is negotiable, and thinking clearly about which parts of the traditional bundle are worth defending and which are conventions we could improve. To understand the competency-based education engine that makes the whole model run, see our companion overview of what Western Governors University is and why it matters to the sector.
The Faculty Model Comparison Worksheet
A side-by-side worksheet comparing the traditional fused professor role with disaggregated models across autonomy, workload, research, student relationship, and career path — to help you evaluate a non-traditional role or reform proposal.
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Frequently asked questions
Do WGU faculty do research?
Mostly no, and this is a fundamental difference from traditional universities. WGU's model is built around teaching, mentoring, and assessment at scale rather than the research-plus-teaching fusion of conventional academic posts. Some staff engage in scholarship of teaching or institutional research, but the classic research-active professorship with its own programme of disciplinary research is not the norm. Academics for whom research is central should weigh this carefully.
What is the difference between a program mentor and a course instructor at WGU?
A program mentor is assigned to a student for their entire degree and guides overall progress, motivation, and pacing — the relationship anchor and coach across the whole programme. A course instructor is a subject-matter expert attached to specific courses who provides on-demand teaching and tutoring on the content. One owns the long-term student relationship; the other provides specialised subject help. Assessment is handled separately again by evaluators.
Is the disaggregated faculty model better than the traditional professor role?
It is a genuine trade-off, not a clear improvement. Disaggregation gains specialisation, scale, consistency, and often affordability and flexibility, but it fragments the holistic teacher-student relationship, reduces individual academic autonomy, and typically removes the research component. Whether it is better depends on what you believe education fundamentally requires and on the pressures — access, cost, scale — a given institution faces. Many universities borrow parts of it without adopting the whole.
The AcademicStaff editorial team writes practical, evidence-based guidance for university staff — drawing on sector reporting, funder guidelines and the lived administrative reality of academic work. Every guide is reviewed for accuracy against current Australian higher-education practice.