Online College Teaching Jobs are the Future of Post Secondary Education

Educators are starting to wake up to the budget cuts at traditional academic institutions. Colleges and universities are disposing of college teachers at an alarming rate. Some four-year state colleges are instituting twenty five percent budget cuts that will result in the dismissal of all part-time instructors. However, on the positive side of all this doom and gloom are the benefits of distance education technology producing online college teaching jobs. The emergence and acceptance of online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs are making the online adjunct instructor the future of post-secondary education. That is a very bold statement on its face, but it is becoming more apparent every day that higher education simply will not support tenure-track professors and the many benefits afforded them and it is even more apparent that tenured faculty members are less attractive every day due to the long-tem costs they represent to the college administration.

As the schools are less able to afford to hire full time faculty members, the more important individuals with graduate degrees and the technical ability to successfully navigate an online degree program and efficiently accomplish all the teaching tasks required by online college courses will become to them because the student populations will not go down over that time. As a result of ravaged traditional faculty positions, the schools will be happy to work with the online adjunct instructor who has learned the all important lesson of how to transform into an academic entrepreneur.

As the academic entrepreneur demonstrates the ability to teach eight to ten online college courses one time and learns that those academic coordination skills, time management and technical expertise, are at a premium due to the relatively small number of educators with them, the more efficient the negotiations with the online college degree programs will become over time. The upshot of informed interaction with schools that offer their students the chance to earn an online business management degree, a communications degree or an online finance degree is the ability to teach at any geographic location, multiple income streams arriving as often as once a week and a concrete sense of control over one’s economic future.

In the past, traditional college adjunct were trapped, so to speak, in one geographic area because they had to be able to reach the next physical college campus by driving a personal vehicle. If the college adjunct lived in a less populated part of the country it was only possible to teach college students for one or two community colleges or state-colleges. Today, the emerging system of online college programs combined with inexpensive computers capable of wireless access of the Internet is developing an incredible career path for individuals with graduate degrees and a clear idea of how to take advantage of online degree programs as independent online adjunct instructors.

The best way to start searching for online adjunct employment opportunities is to visit the websites of the over five thousand technical schools, community colleges, state colleges and for profit schools and follow the link on the front page to the faculty application portal.

Online College Teaching Jobs Are Cash Cows

You owe it to yourself to learn how online college teaching jobs are cash cows. For you Liberal Arts majors out there, cash cow is a term indicating an activity that produces money. Got it: money, cash, income. So, the idea is that if you have at least an earned Master’s degree in a general academic area there is a nice income to be made by teaching multiple online college classes for online university programs. Think about that for a minute. Instead of living in an abandoned car and using pages ripped from your second hand copy of the Steinbeck Omnibus to mop up your tears of intellectual despair at earning less for a week’s hard work teaching the conjugation of irregular verbs than a illiterate hod carrier makes in two days, instead of teaching a few composition courses and lurking around like a panhandler in an effort to pick up the odd hour or two in the writing lab for the local State university or community college, which has every intention of throwing you directly under the bus, so to speak, the minute the state politicians further reduce funding for higher education, instead of wondering where in the hell you went wrong, try imagining how it would feel to have a roll of warm bills in your pocket from multiple online college teaching jobs.

Now, if you are one of those benighted college adjuncts who moan, “But, but, I’ve got an education! I’ve read a lot of literature! I’m capable of critical thinking!” then look for an old newspaper blowing down the street and read the headlines: the economy has changed, and if you don’t change with it there is nothing but trouble ahead. Nearly every state in the union is out of money, and in almost every case the first state-funded operation to feel the funding cuts is post-secondary education. That’s the problem; here is the solution. At the very schools you teach at every day there are so many computers hooked to the Internet it’s a wonder you don’t trip over one and break an arm. Learn to use the computer to search for any post-secondary institution, and every one of them has a web site these days, that offers online college courses to their students attending one or more online bachelor degree programs. Once you have found a school’s web site, dig around a little and find the employment application link. Sometimes this link is called employment, jobs, faculty positions or something similar, but you will soon train yourself to spot it immediately if you make the effort. Once you are at the employment application page, do what is required to submit your application for online adjunct jobs.

This is not the really highbrow work—like analyzing some vague passage from Milton—but if you make enough applications you will eventually receive a positive response. For example, the number of for-profit colleges and universities is growing almost daily, and the student populations at those for-profit schools are exploding because of the high rate of unemployment. Further, the majority of the students attending the for-profit schools require core curriculum classes just as your students at the traditional schools require basic math or composition. The difference, and this is really important, is that you can teach for multiple online programs from the same computer. It is possible to teach two classes each for five schools that offer an accredited online degree program of some kind to their general student population. That means you could have an income from five different schools pouring into your pocket at the same time. Now imagine how nice it would be to sleep in a bed—with clean sheets!—every night. Yes, you owe it to yourself to find and apply for those online college teaching jobs today.