The traditional college instructor working as an adjunct at physical post-secondary academic institutions is probably in an intellectual swoon as the next long semester starts and the pay is just a low as it was the last long semester and the class sizes are much larger due to the absence of many of the other adjunct college teachers who were fired or simply not re-hired in order to save what is left of the faculty budget. While this is quite distressful, to say the least, for someone who has earned a graduate degree it is important to find some way to carry on.
The most viable avenue for continuing to teach college students and earn a real living from that intellectual activity is to push on to find online college faculty positions. The shift from the physical college classroom to the digital college campus by traditional colleges, community colleges and universities is occurring right now. The for-profit colleges that confer the online master’s degree and the accredited online bachelor degree are much farther ahead in the implementation of distance education technology because they are less constrained in the decision making process than bureaucracy-heavy, state-funded post-secondary academic institutions.
However, the traditional schools are now in the process of catching up in terms of offering more online bachelor degree programs and accredited online master degree programs to their student populations, which are growing faster than at any time during the last sixty years. The benefit of the growth of online college classes is that there is a concurrent growth in the need for qualified online adjunct instructors to teach the online courses.
Further, new and returning college students actually want to earn online elementary teaching degrees, an online project management degree or an online masters degree in education from their personal computers at home or at work. These college students and the online degree programs offered in increasing numbers by traditional colleges and universities comprise the current academic marketplace in which a college teacher seeking a decent living and transform from a mere faculty employee into an academic entrepreneur.
An online adjunct instructor who masters tested time management techniques and learns digital navigation skills to the point that it is actually easy to navigate the Internet using a laptop computer can earn a substantial amount of online adjunct income by acquiring multiple online faculty positions. The most effective search strategy for finding online adjunct faculty positions is to go directly to the thousands of academic websites that contain all the necessary information for applying to the various technical schools, community colleges, state colleges, four-year universities and for-profit colleges. On the front page of each school’s website is a link that will allow the prospective online adjunct instructor to navigate easily to the faculty application portal, which is designed to accept academic credential.
It should be understood by any individual with an earned graduate degree that teaching online is very attractive to many other people with the necessary educational backgrounds to be acceptable to a college or university with online college degree programs. The competition is tough for online adjunct instructor positions, but they can be acquired in multiples if the push is made to find online college faculty positions.
