The Academic Option of Online Professor Positions

It could be forgiven if an academic today considered the options for teaching to be diminishing in the apparently unavoidable face of failing faculty budgets. On the part of individuals with earned graduate degrees, a master’s degree or Ph.D., the chances of attaining a tenure track position diminish with each passing academic year, and the chances of spending an intellectual life as a traditional adjunct college instructor living on table scraps as a result of the ridiculously low pay for the few available college classes in a physical classroom grows more concrete with each rise in the cost of food and fuel. On the part of teachers at the secondary level of the academy the mass layoffs now occurring and those that will occur in the not-so-distant future are proof enough that even the possession of an advanced academic degree, once a very real ticket to economic security and social stability, is no effective bulwark to rising academic unemployment. So what to do about the situation now that it has to be dealt with in an intelligent and, hopefully, income producing fashion? Frankly, the best way to cope with the changes in the academic labor market, which are not temporary, is to teach online for a variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs.

The emergence of online professor positions as a viable academic option for teachers with graduate degrees is directly related to distance education technology and the diminution of budgetary monies to operate the physical college and university campuses. Administrators of academic institutions at all levels are in a tizzy as to how to maintain the physical plants known as campuses and staff the faculties with enough academically prepared instructors to meet the instructional needs of ballooning student bodies. This is the point in the post-secondary educational process where the online special education degree, online nursing masters programs and online business management degrees come to the rescue of administrators, teachers and college students. In an era of rapidly diminishing economic resources, it is simply less expensive to deliver and earn a college education on the Internet than it is to build and maintain physical college and university classroom and pay for the constant maintenance of the physical structures.

In particular, unemployed academics with a modest level of technical skill can use a personal computer to populate an online teaching schedule with adjunct online jobs with will generate a very real living. For example, teaching six to ten online college courses with a variety of online bachelor degree programs can produce six to ten online adjunct income streams from practically any physical spot on the globe. More to the point, if one of the adjunct teaching positions online become too burdensome it is relatively simple to go the website of yet another of the thousands of for-profit colleges, community colleges, state universities and four-year colleges and apply for more online faculty teaching jobs. Since accredited distance learning programs are the future of post-secondary education, the chances that an alert online adjunct instructor will ever be without available online professor positions are very slim.

Responding to Online Adjunct Teaching Positions is Smart

Many educators at both the post-secondary and secondary level of the academy do not know which direction they should turn in since the budget cuts for public education are descending at a furious rate. However, there is an alternative to the confusion. The mere existence of online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs makes responding to online adjunct teaching positions is smart in terms of making a decent living from delivering educational instruction to college and university students enrolled in online college courses. The real reason academic administrators are so enthusiastic about distance education technology is that it is considerably less expensive to operate and maintain than the physical plant known as the college or university campus. What is more, the move to make an online bachelor of nursing degree, an online masters degree in education or an online criminal justice degree, to name just three areas of post-secondary study, easily accessible to new and returning college students will simply not reverse itself in future. In fact, since college students are literally piling into online degree programs in unprecedented numbers, the opportunities to teach online full time or part time are growing in tandem.

The very best way to go about populating an online teaching schedule is to visit the websites of the thousands of community colleges, state colleges, four-year universities and for-profit colleges and locating the link on the first page of the site that leads to the faculty application section. This section will permit the prospective online adjunct college instructor to submit the necessary academic credentials plus evidence of any classroom experience. It is vitally important to continue submitting applications for online adjunct jobs since the competition for these online adjunct teaching positions grows with each new wave of mass layoffs of teachers and the growing awareness of traditional adjunct faculty members that continuing to work on physical college campuses will never produce a decent income. The aggressive online adjunct instructor will be successful only by treating online teaching as a business. This posture towards teaching college students in general requires considerable adjustment in attitude and approach.

In many ways teaching online for a variety of online degree programs requires the mindset of an entrepreneur. This means that the online adjunct professor views the thousands of public colleges and universities as potential clients that need the academic and technical skill set provided by the online instructor. Granted, the academic entrepreneur must take a great deal more responsibility for evaluating the cost ratio of each engagement with each of the online classes for a college or university, but the positive result of this analysis will be the ability to only teach online for the online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs that pay a larger amount of money for each online course. This analysis is distinctly different from that which is used by a public employee teaching as an adjunct faculty member for a traditional school. Ultimately, the ability to acquire more online college courses to teach is a learned skill, but it is a level of economic and academic competence that can be achieve with determination and work.