The Goal is To Become an Online Adjunct Instructor

The economic goalposts, so to speak, for academics are moving almost beyond the visible horizon as a result of the budget cuts directed at public education. A traditional adjunct instructor teaching on a physical college or university campus is barely making a living from two or three college classes available to teach, and this unenviable dilemma is exacerbated by the difficulty obtaining additional classes to teach since it is necessary for a traditional college faculty member to be able to drive to the next campus in order to earn the small amount from teaching at that post-secondary institution. Educators at secondary academic institutions are facing massive layoffs that leave them completely without any income at all. On the other hand, the academic administrators responsible for meeting the educational demands of the swelling student populations at the college and university level o the academy are moving as quickly as possible to distance education technology as an affordable means of delivering educational instruction to college and university students. This transition out of the physical plant known as the university, community and college campus and the classrooms on them and into online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs is occurring because the budget funds allowed public education for operational and maintenance is simply not enough to adequately cover the costs of the physical plants and the faculty salaries.

The result of this transition is large numbers of online teaching opportunities for alert, aggressive individuals with earned graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, and a burning desire to take back control of their teaching career by becoming a full time online adjunct instructor, which should be the primary goal of every teacher now that want to earn a decent living. Additionally, college and university students today are so comfortable with their personal computers and the Internet that earning an online masters in psychology, an engineering degree online or a registered nursing degree online is a natural action given the technological development now in play in the academy. The academic that grasps the dynamics of online teaching and how six to eight online college courses taught from a laptop can generate multiple online adjunct income streams will be considerably closer to economic success and professional satisfaction that continuing to try to reclaim the classroom.

The best approach to landing as many online adjunct jobs as possible in the shortest period of time is to start making applications for faculty positions as an online adjunct instructor at the over five thousand state colleges, four year universities and community colleges. Every post-secondary academic institution now offers some form of accredited distance learning program to their students and even more online college degree programs will be implemented in the coming semesters. Of course, the economic benefits of online teaching, while very nice once a certain level is reached by the online adjunct instructor, are less attractive to many educators than the mobility inherent in teaching from a personal computer that can be picked up and taken to practically any place on the globe.

Online College Teaching Jobs

Any college instructor today knows that state budget cuts are taking their toll on the teachers who are the most economically vulnerable member of the academy: adjuncts. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future, so it is important to start looking now for online college teaching jobs. There are more and more college students taking online college classes today than at any time in history. The result of this startling increase in student population is a corresponding increase in the number of online college classes needing qualified academic instructors. It is vitally important for all college adjuncts to understand that distance education is the future of post-secondary education, and the future is now. As hard as it might be for some teachers to believe, there really is a decent living to be made by teaching online classes to students earning an online bachelor degree or an online master degree. It is hard to imagine a technical school, community college or four year university that isn’t working overtime to put an online degree program into place. The reason they, academic institutions, are putting in such effort is that it is much, much cheaper to offer online classes than to maintain physical classes that require heating and cooling and cleaning. The technology required to operate an online masters degree program is mature enough to depend on every day, and it is enormously profitable for the schools to acquire and activate the necessary hardware and software. With all of this in mind, the agile college teacher will immediately start designing a cogent plan to apply to every online bachelor degree program, and to keep applying until a positive response is received in the e-mail. Granted, there is a technology and time management curve that must be mastered in order to teach enough online college classes to make a decent living, but here can be no doubt now that the online college teaching jobs are out on the Internet for the asking. The first step to acquiring multiple online adjunct faculty positions with schools that offer the associate degree online or the bachelor degree online is to identify the web sites of all the post-secondary schools. Today, that means continually locating the school’s web site on the Internet, and every school has a web presence. While the employment search engines do a fine job of receiving new opening announcements from the colleges and universities, there is nothing better than a direct application to the school for producing the desired result. The point is to have a program of application that crates a continuous stream of applications for the online adjunct jobs. This disciplined approach to finding adjunct teaching positions with a university online. Granted, there is a great deal of discussion these days about the academic validity of online degrees and the schools that offer accredited online degree programs to their many students, but this application process isn’t about analyzing the schools’ intellectual fitness, it about paying the bills with online college teaching jobs.