Start Approving the Idea of Online Adjunct Faculty Job Openings

The shock for public school teachers that have been laid off as a result of budgetary cuts at the state level is debilitating at first because there seems little else to do with the graduate degree that was so difficult to earn. There is no point in trying to move up the academic ladder because those positions are occupied by the academic administrators that handed out eh pink slips in the first place, and there really isn’t any reason to try to move down the economic ladder and join the larger work force because there is such large amount of unemployment in that very crowded section of the labor force. While this all sounds quite dire for academics with years still to teach, the remedy, interestingly, is to start approving the idea of online adjunct faculty job openings. The fact of the matter is that the layoffs of adjunct college professors, high school teachers and elementary school teachers in public academic setting is the direct result of the physical plants becoming entirely too expensive to continuing supporting every day. This is no more evident than at the post-secondary level of the academy. Traditional adjunct college faculty members have been teaching as part-time public employees for at least a decade without actually making a decent living. This group of teachers is well aware of the move by administrators to populate the faculty with adjunct instructors. The real problem these educators have at the moment is that they must find another one or two college, university or community college campuses to teach on every day in order to even begin making enough income to pay their bills, but in order to actually reach the physical college classroom on another campus it is necessary to physically travel there in a motor vehicle. Usually, this requirement to be present in person in the classroom in order to teach it drains the income of the adjunct college professor until practically nothing is left to live on.

The idea of acquiring, for example, online adjunct English instructor employment or becoming a community college online adjunct is reinforced by the acceptance of online degree programs leading to an online accounting degree, a health administration degree online or an electrical engineering bachelor degree online using their personal computers at work and at home. Obviously, this enthusiasm on the part of new and returning college and university students is not going unnoticed by college and university administrators. Therefore, an underemployed or unemployed public school teacher can easily understand that as more online college degree programs are offered to the community college and university students more opportunities to secure community college online teaching or to become an online psychology adjunct will emerge. The alert academic with a graduate degree, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, or the aggressive public school teacher at the secondary level of the academy that is welling to earn a master’s degree can learn how to apply for online adjunct faculty job openings and develop a full time online teaching schedule. The best place to apply for online adjunct jobs is the website of the thousands of state colleges, four-year universities, community colleges and for-profit colleges that already offer their student populations many online college courses.

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.