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.