Online Faculty Openings are the New Academic Watering Holes

It can be a long, dry walk across the academic labor market for college instructors teaching on an adjunct basis for traditional post-secondary institutions these days, but for the alert person with an earned graduate degree, it may come as a welcome relief to find out that online faculty openings are the new academic watering holes. Online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs are swiftly becoming the choice of new and returning college students. Student populations are higher than they have been in the last fifty years, and there does not seem to be any decrease on the horizon. This concerted movement to online degree programs is beneficial for college adjuncts now being forced to retreat from traditional college campuses because of massive budgets cuts is that every online college course in every online college degree program must have an academically qualified online instructor directing the college students as they matriculate toward a law degree online or a psychology degree online.

While many college adjunct instructors desire a full-time faculty position with benefits, the reality of the academic labor market is that college administrators are quite happy with a professoriate that is composed of seventy to eighty percent adjunct instructors working part-time, and that academic employment circumstance is not changing anytime soon. The best approach for a person with a graduate degree, a master’s degree or Ph.D., is to recognize that the situation will not change and work to accommodate the new economic paradigm. The new academic labor model will require a person who wishes to earn a decent living by teaching online college courses to become an academic entrepreneur.

An academic entrepreneur is not simply a faculty member of a college or university. Online adjunct instructors, who must become entrepreneurial in their behavior and thinking to be successful, literally sell an educational and technical skill set to thousands of post-secondary academic institutions offering online college degree programs to their students. All online teaching tasks and duties are conducted from a personal computer accessing the Internet. This is a very positive aspect of teaching online courses because it allows a great deal of personal and professional freedom.

It is possible for an online adjunct instructor to earn forty to fifty thousand dollars a year teaching six to eight online college classes if the online college teacher is alert to the selection process inherent in the entrepreneurial approach to the post-secondary academic industry. In many instances, and this especially true for for-profit schools that confer the bachelors degree online, the class lengths are as short as six weeks long, and they run back to back. This means that one set of online classes ends on the same day the next set of online college courses begins. Further, many for profit online college degree programs run almost the entire year around, so it is no longer necessary to suffer through a summer without classes to teach. All in all, online faculty openings represent a very refreshing oasis on the desert of adjunct teaching.