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.
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.