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Online Adjunct Faculty Win Every Time

The unfortunate academic news just keeps coming and many college teachers, especially those that teach on an adjunct basis, are extremely worried about retaining their college and university classes at the traditional campuses. The solution to this distress set of circumstances is to become part of an online adjunct faculty as soon as possible. The reality of the academic labor market is that distance education technology is being used to replace the physical college and university classroom. The reason this is happening is because academic administrators can’t continue spending diminishing budgetary funds on expensive physical plants, and are instead developing as many inexpensive online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs as possible every semester. This proliferation of online college courses is a genuine boon for individual with earned graduate degrees that want to teach at the post-secondary level for a career.

As state budgets are reduced by the current economic crisis, the faculty budgets at state colleges, universities and community colleges are in a real tailspin, so the adjunct instructors on the traditional are less likely to be paid enough to teach an individual class to qualify as an actual living wage. The antidote to this is to learn enough about the functions of a personal computer to access the internet and the online college degree programs that are on it. Further, it is necessary to develop a rotational application process that sends out dozens and hundreds of applications for online faculty positions every day. These two elements, mastery of a personal computer and a continuous application procedure, can result in multiple online adjunct income streams from online accounting schools, online business schools and online criminal justice schools all year long.

The growth of online degree programs is driven by the enthusiasm new and returning college and university students express for the chance to earn a degree online from their electronic devices, which do not require them to travel in a personal vehicle to a remote campus location at difficult hours, and the cost-efficiency of delivering post-secondary instruction on the Internet instead of in a physical building that requires heating and cooling all the year around. At the same time, distance education is a great opportunity for any person willing to earn a master’s degree or Ph.D. and learn the dynamic of being an academic entrepreneur instead of a state employee stuck in a geographic location. The primary benefit of teaching online is that it is not required for an online adjunct instructor to live near the college or university campus in order to appear in the online classroom every time it meets during the duration of the class.

Additionally, the online college classes in the online degree programs are usually much shorter in terms of the numbers of weeks than the traditional sixteen-week semester. Often, an online course will only last six to eight weeks long. This means it will be possible for an online adjunct professor to teach many more online college courses over the course of twelve months, and as a result the income from these additional classes will be much greater each month. Overall, teaching online is well worth the effort required to master the use of the Internet and the time it takes to access the various online university programs and make applications for a position in the online adjunct faculty.

Online Adjunct Faculty Positions Win the Game

If may seem somewhat disingenuous to describe post-secondary instruction as a game, but the reality of the academy is that the labor market for individual with earned graduate degrees is so slippery now that a mindset focused on winning the game is required in order to continue earning a paycheck from teaching college and university students. This paradigm shift, however, need not mean long term unemployment for agile adjunct faculty members. First, it is vitally important for teachers at any level of the education system to grasp the hard fact that the funds needed to actually pay teachers is coming from a source that is drying up. Make no mistake about it: as the semesters roll by the faculty budgetary funds will continue to shrink, which will result in less money for teaching an individual college class in a physical classroom. The online bachelor degree programs and the online master’s degree program, however, will only increase in numbers and truly represent a way that an online adjunct instructor willing to take the time to master the functional navigation of the Internet with a personal computer can develop a full time roster of online adjunct faculty positions.

Any person with a Ph.D. or master’s degree can certainly learn how to apply for an opportunity to teach one or more online college courses in order to supplement an income derived from teaching for traditional community colleges, state universities and four year colleges. It is not at all necessary to permanently leave the traditional post-secondary classroom in order to take full advantage of distance education technology. In fact, a combination of traditional campus teaching and online degree programs participation may be the best strategy for many adjunct college professors. The actual bright spot online college degree programs represent for prospective adjunct college teachers is that they will eventually replace the vast majority of physical post-secondary classrooms. This will happen simply because it much more cost-effective for university administrators to deliver college-level instruction over the Internet than it is to continue trying to maintain the expensive physical plant known as the campus with ever-diminishing amounts of budgetary funds.

Here is now the economic side of online teaching works for an online adjunct instructor. It is possible to acquire eight to ten online adjunct jobs and successfully address them from an academic perspective by simply using an inexpensive laptop computer. Further, it is possible to easily access the online bachelor degree programs from any geographical location on the globe that offers a connection to the Internet, which today means practically any location. Generally speaking, online courses are shorter in duration and run throughout the year. So, it is possible for an adroit online instructor to generate eight or ten individual online adjunct income paychecks eleven or twelve months a year. Even better, it is easy to replace an online course with an individual online degree program, which will need to be done from time to time due to emerging conflicts with administrators demanding more instructional and administrative work than they are will to pay for, by identifying and applying to additional online nursing schools, online law degree programs or online business degree programs.