A Collection of Adjunct Online Teaching Opportunities

The educator today that is not experiencing a heightened level of anxiety concerning the impending layoffs in the public education sector of the economy is a rare intellectual indeed. The fact of the matter is that secondary educators are now being put into the same glide path as the post-secondary educators, the adjunct college and faculty staff, have been in for over the a decade. Of course, the reason for all of this academic unemployment and underemployment is the sheer cost of maintaining the physical plants known as campuses with fewer budgetary monies. Since the squeeze on state budgets, which is the source of the vast majority of salaries for public school teachers at all levels of the academy, is apparently a force to be contended with for a very long time, it would be prudent for any individual with a master’s degree or Ph.D. to start building a collection of adjunct online teaching opportunities. The reason for this judicious approach to academic work is that the labor market for educators at all levels of the academy is changing its features every day.

As more academic area of study are made available to new and returning post-secondary students in the forms of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs the more need there is for academically prepared and technically aware online adjunct instructors. The academic with a earned bachelor degree that puts in the time to acquire a graduate degree or the academic that already has a graduate degree making the effort o master the navigation of online accredited degree programs will discover that the thousands of state colleges, four-year universities, community colleges and technical schools are in the process of deploying large numbers of online college courses leading enrolled students to an online marketing degree, a health administration degree online or an online pharmacy degree. Ultimately, it will be only a few more years until almost all post-secondary instruction will be available in the form of distance learning degrees. As the physical college classroom become less affordable for academic administrators, they will eagerly implement distance education technology as a way to effectively meet the educational needs of swelling student populations.

Of course, there must be a search strategy in place before a collection of employment opportunities for teaching jobs online can be acquired and sorted in an orderly fashion that will generate a comprehendible analysis of the new academic labor market and the academic’s place in it. Generally speaking it is important for the prospective online adjunct instructor to watch as many of the over five thousand websites representing post-secondary academic institutions on a daily basis. Granted, this is possibly an overwhelming number of schools to keep an eye on every day, but the reality of the labor market for teachers requires new views of how higher education works as an industry. By making the effort to learn how to locate the link on the first page of a college or university website that leads to the faculty application section the alert online adjunct college instructor can develop a genuine feel for how many online college classes a given school is deploying each semester. By way of this analytical process, it will be fairly easy to populate an online teaching portfolio with a collection of adjunct online teaching opportunities and earn a decent living from delivering educational instruction online throughout the calendar year.