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.