Advantages of Being an Online College Adjunct

With faculty layoffs at the post-secondary and secondary levels of the academy mounting daily educators will want to take a hard look at teaching online as a viable activity for generating a living wage. However, many traditional educators are so unfamiliar with accredited distance learning programs that they will wonder what exactly are some of the advantages of being an online college adjunct? To begin with there are financial advantages and personal advantages. The main financial advantages are the doubling of a teacher’s pay per unit time and the personal advantages of speed and less stress because of built in technology that works for the online instructor. The job of the professor teaching for a variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs becomes more that of a facilitator than a traditional teacher.

The organization of time provides one of the main reasons that online teaching is superior to traditional on the ground organization. It is this asynchronous organization of time that enables one to double the pay the system provides when compared to the traditional organization. This is so because the traditional semester lasts for sixteen weeks and the online semester lasts only seven and a half weeks. In seven and a half weeks, the instructor can move on to a new semester. In a given time period, the online system doubles one’s pay. There is no break between semesters for the online system, thus using the time more efficiently. The traditional system operates on real time but the online system operates on asynchronous time. The traditional academic system operates in real space; online degree programs operate on the Internet. The advantage of collapsing time in this way enables the professor to live in Memphis and work with students who live in California or New York and are earning an online special education degree, an accredited online accounting degree or one of several online degrees for military. It enables the instructor to travel the world and, using a laptop, to maintain control of his classes. Moreover, the online adjunct instructor does not have to physically commute to his classes.

Commuting is wrought with hazards. One has to schedule time in such a way that they can be on time for classes from different colleges. Why different colleges? It turns out that most colleges that operate on traditional time do not allow the teachers to teach more than a couple of classes. If they want a raise, which is unheard of, they must work for more than one college. Therefore, the instructor finds himself scrambling from one teaching site to the next. Such scrambling increases the likelihood of having an accident. In addition, one must contend with red lights, toll bridges, poor night vision, torrential rain and floods, and rising costs of gasoline. One must also consider car insurance and repairs. Another expense of having to commute is that one must dress professionally. This means higher cleaning bills. If the expense of traditional teaching is subtracted from one’s earnings, most instructors that make the leap to are surprised by the recalculation of their net profit. Some actually discover that they are not making a net profit. There are even cases where the instructor is unintentionally paying the school for the privilege of teaching for them. This unawareness is the result of years of indoctrination in the values and goals of traditional teaching.

There are other aspects to online teaching that save time and energy and needless repetition. For example, in online college degree programs, one does not have to take attendance. This is done for the instructor. It is done automatically when the student signs into class. The students are electronically registered as present, absent or tardy. If the student misses more than a stipulated percentage of a class, they are marked as absent.

Another time saver and stress reduction feature is the built in tutorials. For example, if the instructor notes that the student has problems with subject- verb disagreement, she can refer this student to a tutorial on this grammatical concept. The same holds for a student who does not understand the use of APA style manual. Another example is the use of various anti-plagiarism websites that can teach students in online college courses the proper way to avoid academic writing and documentation errors. If the student wants to get maximum feedback from this system, then it behooves them to study the system. Another time saver is the advance planning built into the system. The instructor does not have to create a curriculum or weekly lesson plans. This is laid out for them by the online degree system. Evaluation is assisted by use of a rubric that contains a point value for each student performance of a skill. Some examples are group projects, individual research, objective tests, presentations and discussion threads.

If the above features look attractive, one can do a search for online schools by obtaining lists from universities and their department of human resources. Once one receives a list, she can check out the school at their websites. The prospective online college adjunct instructor can look for the goals and values claimed by the school. Work on the CV by creating a template which needs only a slight revision for each school on the list. Later, the teacher will go through an interview and a training to learn the navigation of the new system. Then one is assigned a mentor and after teaching a couple of classes, one can become a full time online college professor in short order.