Give Your Teaching Momentum with Online Adjunct Professor Positions

Most teachers really like to teach despite the problems surrounding the profession right now, and one of the biggest problems is income. Not being sure about having an income or having one’s current income reduced or eliminated completely can drive a teacher to distraction or worse. It doesn’t have to be this way, however, and distance education technology is the tool that can permit individuals with earned graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or a master’s degree, to add momentum to their teaching schedules with online adjunct professor positions. A large portion of the new and returning college students currently swelling student populations are termed non-traditional college students.

These students have many family and employment obligations that often interfere with class schedules, and this is especially true if the non-traditional students have to drive a personal vehicle to a remote location such as a college campus on the edge of the community at odd hours of the day and night in order to attend a lecture or take a test. These students appreciate the opportunity to earn an online masters degree or bachelors degree online from their computers at home. As every college teacher knows, every accredited college class must be lead by a academically qualified instructor, and online college courses are no different in this regard since the online classes are part of accredited online college degree programs.

These seeming isolated circumstances can work together to the benefit of teachers with earned graduate degree because they mean that the community colleges, state-colleges, four-year universities and for-profit schools that confer an online degree need people with the appropriate academic credentials and the technical know-how to teach the growing numbers of online classes that lead to an online social work degree, a health administration degree online or an online psychology degree. Simply put, colleges and universities that are promoting online college degree programs do not have as many online adjunct instructors as they need now, and the shortage will only grow greater in the future because student populations will continue to grow at a rapid pace.

As a result of this shortage of adept online college teachers, an individual already teaching college classes at a traditional post-secondary institution can propel his or her teaching career by acquiring online adjunct jobs. Teaching online for schools that offer fully accredited online degrees can produce a nice additional income even if the college instructor only teach two or three online college courses at a time. For example, many for-profit schools online offer online classes that run only six week, and there are many that offer the eleven-week quarter online classes to their students. Additionally, these shorter classes are offered to students throughout the year, so there is no dreaded summer break that leaves so many traditional college adjuncts without an income for almost three months.

A year-long way of earning money from teaching multiple online college classes will certainly energize the flagging enthusiasm of any college adjunct instructor, and after a period of time during which a decent living is made from an inexpensive laptop access the Internet from practically any geographic location, the person with an earned graduate degree may decided that enough online faculty positions actually constitute a new teaching career.

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.