Employment Opportunities for Teaching Online

Educators need a game plan, a Plan B, so to speak, to deal with the diminishing fiscal resources that occur from the decision to teach for a career, and seeking out employment opportunities for teaching online just might be the ticket. There should be no doubt that adjunct college teachers, high school teachers or anyone with an earned graduate degree, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, providing academic instruction needs to earn more income as a result of the budgetary cuts to public education. Of course, college adjunct instructors have plenty of experience with declining faculty budgets, and they are already at the point on traditional college and university campuses that they have a great deal of trouble keeping a roof over their heads even during the two long semesters, and the summer months and the lack of any college or university classes to teach at all leaves them in desperate straits. Now, of course, practically all teachers are in the financial downdraft long suffered by adjunct college and university faculty members.

There is a bright spot on the horizon, and that bright spot is being fueled by the maturation of distance education technology. This technology basically does away with the need for expensive physical college and university classrooms on a traditional post-secondary campus. The classrooms on the university campus are a serious drain on dwindling budgetary funds from the state, which provides the vast majority of the money to maintain and build out the thousands of campuses, but it is very cost-effective to deliver post-secondary instruction on the Internet using computer servers. This academic development creates a vehicle for people with graduate degrees to develop a full time online teaching portfolio by applying to online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. Further, it is entirely possible to coordinate the academic and administrative tasks of multiple online college courses from an inexpensive laptop computer capable of accessing the online college degree programs located on the Internet.

The best aspect of online teaching is that the online adjunct instructor can work for online degree programs that are not located in the same geographic location. For example, an online adjunct instructor with moderate computer skills can live in a small town in one of the southern states and teach college students earning an online masters degree in education, an online masters degree in school counseling or a mechanical engineering degree online at a school actually located on the eastern or western seaboard. This lack of any need to be in any one physical location in order to teach for online business schools, online accounting schools and online criminal justice schools allows the adroit online adjunct professor to scale the online teaching schedule up or down at will. This scaling of the numbers of online college classes in the schedule is simply not available to adjunct instructors that continue trying to teach in the few available physical classrooms. The most productive way to identify employment opportunities for teaching online is to visit the websites of the thousands of state colleges, for-profit colleges, four-year universities and the many community colleges and locate the link on the front page of each school’s website that leads to the faculty application page.