Take the Perplexity Out of Online Adjunct Faculty Employment

It is time for academics to take the perplexity out of online adjunct faculty employment because it is clear that the budgetary funds necessary to pay full time teaching salaries is being reduced as the economy continues to stumble without pause. Eventually, practically every first year and second year college and university course will be offered in the form of an online class within an online college degree program, and the teacher wishing to continte earning a living will want to learn how to take advantage of the tremendous changes taking place on the traditional post-secondary campus.

However, before there can be any expectation of success for a prospective online adjunct instructor there needs to be an examination of the accepted academic career model taught in graduate school and how it is currently being transformed into an entirely new approach to teaching at the post-secondary level of public education. The fact of the matter is that the administrators responsible for managing the budget of a college or university must confront the economic reality that continuing to pay tenure-track and tenured academics their current salaries and benefits is not supportable given the decline in available monies from the usual sources. Instead, the traditional academic faculty positions will be replaced with online adjunct positions filled by technically adept and entrepreneurially inclined educators willing to accept the changes in the economic landscape and adjust their expectations of academic employment.

The changes to academic employment forced by the technical ability of delivering post-secondary instruction to millions of college and university students are confusing to many established teachers and new graduates with freshly minted doctorates and master degrees, but this confusion can be cleared up easily and quickly by learning how to think about post-secondary instruction from the perspective of the nimble freelance academic with a firm grasp of how to generate multiple online adjunct income streams instead of the state academic employee expecting to stay at one state college, university, community college or technical school for decades and retire with a lifelong pension.

Every day the traditional adjunct instructor drives to a traditional college or university campus and teaches in a physical college classroom for pennies. Then, if the traditional adjunct is lucky enough to live in a heavily-populated urban area that can actually support multiple traditional post-secondary academic institutions, he or she drives an aging vehicle to yet another campus and teaches college students in yet another physical college classroom for yet more pennies. This is an extremely demoralizing set of circumstances to say the least, and there isn't any relief in sight since college and university administrators are quite pleased with being able to hire individuals with graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master's degree, for practically nothing. Sooner or later, college adjuncts working in a physical college environment will have to realize that the only way for them to actually earn a living from the intellectual effort required to teach university and college students is to acquire an online teaching schedule full of online college courses. It is time for traditional college and university adjuncts to stop the academic grind with online adjunct positions.

For-profit colleges that offer new and returning college students a chance to enroll in online college degree programs resulting in a library science degree, an online project management degree or an online special education degree have successfully demonstrated that distance education technology not only works well but is quite popular with individuals confident about their personal computer skills, which is the vast majority of people today returning to college.

An online adjunct instructor with superior technical skills*can apply for adjunct online teaching opportunities constantly because the entire faculty application process for online degree programs is online. Once the online faculty position application documents have been gathered and put into digital form a college teacher can apply to ten or twenty accredited online college degree programs every day. Of course, this activity takes time and effort, but it is well worth the investment since sooner or later the invitations to teach online will start arriving and the online teaching schedule will start filling up.

Eventually, it will be possible for an aggressive online college instructor to acquire enough adjunct online teaching opportunities to teach online full time. At that point it will be possible for the online teacher to gain complete control of the online teaching schedule in the sense that it will be possible to ditch the online college courses that do not pay all that well for ones that pay more money in the form of multiple online adjunct income streams.

As more traditional college, four-year universities and community colleges put online degree programs into place in an attempt to accommodate the educational needs of the large numbers of new and returning college students attempting to earn a college degree or university degree in order to improve their chances at a better career upon graduation, the more qualified online adjunct instructors will be needed to teach the online college courses within the online university degree programs. For these reason it is important to stop the academic grind with online adjunct positions.

Every educator with a graduate degree, a doctorate or master degree, can teach online for a variety of online college degree programs with just a little effort. All that is really needed is some practice navigating the websites of colleges and four-year universities that offer their enrolled students a chance to earn an academic degree by attending and completing online college courses. The most important step to becoming an online adjunct instructor is to learn how to use a personal computer to locate and navigate online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs offered by post-secondary academic institutions.

The aggressive online college teacher can easily coordinate an online teaching schedule with enough online courses in it to generate a real living from a laptop. After all, it is possible to teach for four or five online degree programs at one time since all of the academic work is located on the Internet. It will not be easy to acquire multiple online college courses to teach online, but with the right amount of focus it is possible to build multiple online adjunct income streams that continue all year long.

Granted, the benefits of online teaching are hard to believe since the usual conditions for adjunct college instructors are so difficult that it is practically impossible to earn a living during the twelve months of the calendar year. On the other hand online college degree programs often continue during the summer months. This means it is possible for an online adjunct to continue earning several checks for online bachelor degree programs without waiting for college and university classes to resume at the beginning of the traditional academic year.

The recent graduate with an academic credential in hand that permits teaching at the post-secondary level of the academy is probably in possession of large amounts of debt obligation, and this graduate would do himself or herself a huge favor by teaching for three or four online bachelor degree programs or online master degree programs while seeking full time academic employment at a traditional college or university. The sad reality is that the need for ready income cannot wait for a search committee at a community college to make up its mind about twenty or thirty candidates. That ready income can be earned by an intellectual with a doctorate or master degree and at least a little ability with a personal computer. The first task that needs to be mastered by the prospective online adjunct college professor is the actual search for online adjunct positions available at the thousands of community colleges, four-year universities and for-profit colleges.

It will take some time for any new online adjunct instructor to learn how to quickly locate and enter the faculty application section of a school's website, but after making at least one hundred applications the skills needed to engage twenty or more colleges and universities each day. This may seem like a lot of effort, but it is important to keep in mind that the current teacher layoffs are pushing ever more academically qualified academics into unemployment and underemployment, plus the sharp need for additional income also acts as a motivation for educators seeking to teach online for a living. Undoubtedly, the college educator today must assess the competition being created by slashed faculty budgets at all levels of the education professional.

Still, an energetic instructor wanting to teach online can still build a teaching portfolio populated with multiple instances of online adjunct faculty employment that can be coordinated from practically any geographic location on the globe. For this reason alone, almost unlimited mobility, the academic frustrated with the fractured salary and hiring environment on the traditional college and university campus should make every effort to transition out of the physical classroom and into an online teaching schedule populate with a variety of online bachelor degree programs.