As any traditional college instructor teaching on an adjunct basis knows the semester gap is very hard to deal since it ultimately means a sharp decrease in teaching income. For those with an earned graduate degree, a master’s degree or Ph.D., one alternative is on online university teaching jobs to bridge the time period in which the money drops off and thoughts of selling retail products start of surface at exactly the wrong times of the night. Distance education technology has matured over the last decade to the point that new and returning college students are actively enrolling in online bachelor degree programs that will allow them to earn an online social work degree or an online mathematics degree from their personal computers at home. Any college instructor currently teaching at an accredited academic institution or any individual who has been laid off from a corporation recently and has a graduate degree can earn a substantial income by teaching these students enrolled in online college degree programs.
There are not all that many college instructors who know the level of income that is possible by engaging in online teaching. Specifically, they don’t know that there are intellectuals with graduate degrees teaching full time on an adjunct basis for schools that offer their students accredited online university degrees, and that those intellectuals are generating multiple income streams throughout the entire year from this online teaching activity. The online adjunct instructors who master the skills required to successfully manage ten or twelve online college courses at one time are finding that online adjunct faculty positions actually pay quite well if one has the right perspective. In many ways, teaching online as an adjunct instructor is more like being an academic entrepreneur than it is being an academic employee.
The academic industry is huge and every college and university in the post-secondary education system will sooner or later offer the bachelors degree online and the master’s degree online to their student populations. The reason they will do they is because distance education technology is extremely cost effective when compared to the cost maintaining the physical plant known as the traditional college campus. This means that every technical school, community college, state college, four-year university and for profit school is a potential customer for the aggressive online adjunct instructor. The trick, if marketing an academic and technical skills set can be called a trick, is to understand that the academic labor model as it is today favors the academic entrepreneur offering to teach online college classes for a set fee and for a set amount of time. In effect, the online adjunct instructor is offering the post-secondary academic institutions exactly what they want, which is a professional that does not want to become a perpetual faculty appendage.
The adept individual with a graduate degree can present the skill set in a way that tells the college or university that the gyrations of the academic labor market, which means the often chaotic point at which ballooning student enrollments clash with declining faculty budgets, are understood by the academic entrepreneur and represent no obstacle to effective online teaching. The online adjunct instructor who can manifest that reality in an application for online faculty positions will not have to worry about bridging the semester gap because there will be plenty of online college classes to teach.
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