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.

Online Adjunct Teaching Opportunities Now

With mass layoffs of educators at every level of the academy on the immediate horizon, it is time to start developing a full time online teaching portfolio in order to continue earning a living as a teacher. Fortunately, distance education technology will allow many individuals with earned graduate degrees to teach online college classes from the convenience of a personal computer, and if the correct mindset is acquired, the adjunct college instructor can easily earn a decent living from any geographical location that offers Internet access. The reality is that the administrators of the physical college and university campuses are unable to continue financing the maintenance of the physical plants (the campuses) that are home to the brick and mortar university classrooms. With the expected budgetary shortfalls for education expected to grow exponentially into the future, and the move against paying traditional college adjunct a living wage gathering strength with each passing semester, the alert academic will make online adjunct faculty positions a career priority.

The primary advantage online teaching has over teaching in a physical classroom concerns the availability of the online college classes in various online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. For example, all that is required to apply for and be offered an online adjunct position with any of over five thousand post-secondary academic institutions is a laptop computer and access to the Internet. On the other hand, college adjunct that continue teaching college and university students in a physical classroom are severely limited as to the numbers of courses they can teach by the driving distance between campuses. In other words, if a college instructor cannot physically show up in the physical classroom, the administration will not pay them for the instruction they deliver there. Obviously, if a college teacher simply can’t reach the next campus by driving an automobile or truck, they cannot increase their income. On the other hand, an online adjunct instructor with well-honed computer skills and an understanding of how the academic labor market has moved to the Internet can acquire ten to twelve online college classes which can be managed in all of their aspects from practically any location on the globe.

In order to discover the online adjunct teaching opportunities available now it is necessary to learn as much about the cost-efficiency of distance education technology for the academic institutions themselves, and how this educational technology can be harnessed in an entrepreneurial fashion by academics that want the freedom to control their own online adjunct incomes. Of course, along with the ability to increase the online adjunct income streams by simply applying to additional online bachelor degree programs, which, after all, have the largest numbers of college and university students, the online faculty member can literally move about at will during the year since it is not necessary to be physically in any one location every day to teach multiple online college classes. As the academic landscape continues to undergo startling changes, with many teachers losing their jobs outright or having their salaries reduced sharply, it will become more important than ever to learn how to find and apply for online adjunct jobs.

Employment Opportunities for Teaching Online Are Growing

The academic labor model is changing so rapidly that it is almost impossible for any college teacher worried about his or her career to keep up with the developments. As the economic shifts at post-secondary academic institutions develop in a tsunami-like fashion, which means the swell of faculty dismissals begins in what appears a remote location and travels to a variety of higher education facilities with a mind-numbing wake of disastrous career implications, and puts more and more tenure-track and tenured academics at the doorstep of unemployment, the pressure to find employment opportunities for teaching online increases with the addition of each new online degree program. The difficulty for most actively engaged college professors is that they are literally unaware of just how quickly the employment ground is slipping beneath their feet, and just how deeply the administrations’ commitment is to distance education technology.

The financial reality is that the cost of maintaining physical college and university campuses is simply not sustainable given that the funding sources, which are largely received from state tax revenues, are drying up and blowing away as a result of the continuing general unemployment. Granted, there are very legitimate arguments being made as to the educational value the education received by attending lectures in a physical space on a traditional college, university or community college campus, but the economic relief for faculty budgets offered by online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs is undeniable and unavoidable today.

These dynamics insist on a fundamental change in how academics view their approach to the employment market and how they manage their primary skill sets in an effort to make a decent living. To be honest, teaching at the post-secondary level of education has never been all that lucrative if the administrator’s salaries are discounted, and the trend in the last decade has been to hire adjunct college instructors instead of adding tenure-track lines in an academic department.

The best possible way for an individual with an earned graduate degree, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, to earn a real living from providing post-secondary instruction is to learn how online college degree programs with available online math teaching jobs, online adjunct English jobs and online elementary teaching jobs. Learning how to locate online degree programs is the first step to acquiring a full time online teaching portfolio populated with a variety of employment opportunities for teaching online. The next step is to setup a rotational application procedure so that each of the thousands of state universities, community colleges and four-year colleges receive an online faculty position application every day of the week. This application process will take some time to develop, but once in place it will function as a constant reminder to the schools that qualified academics are ready to step into the online college classes as they become available.

Ultimately, an aggressive academic seeking new online adjunct faculty employment opportunities every day should be able to successfully transition out of the physical college or university classroom and into a variety of online bachelor degree programs while actually increasing the amount of online adjunct income every month.