Many traditional adjunct faculty members with physical colleges and universities would have a very hard time defining themselves as leading the proverbial good life. The same could be said of educators at the secondary level of the academy. In both cases, the cutbacks in budgetary funds are creating a need for a new career path for teachers with earned graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master’s degree. Of course, the obvious direction of the academy is the online bachelor degree program and the online master degree program. Thus, it is logical to assume that an online teaching instructor leads the good life simply because each and every online college class must have an academically qualified and technically prepared online adjunct instructor teaching it every session, and since there are many more online college degree programs containing multiple online college courses than ever before in academic history it is safe to think that the need for an online teaching instructor is growing by leaps and bounds every day.
The academic administrators responsible for coordinating the diminishing budgets assigned to public education are in a real corner because they have to choose between paying the faculty members a living wage and spending money on building out and maintaining the physical plant known as the college or university campus. In almost every case, the administrators are forced by financial considerations to choose the physical plants over the faculty, which is why almost seventy percent of the college and university faculty teaching in physical university classrooms are working on a adjunct basis. There isn’t enough money to pay college teachers a full time salary with the usual benefits such as retirement and health care. The alternative in this case is to deploy inexpensive distance education technology and offer post-secondary students online healthcare degrees, online nursing classes and online business management degrees that they can access on the internet from their personal computers. At the same time, the instructors teaching the online college courses must accept the inevitable changes in the academic labor force.
These changes in the academic labor model are observable in the growth in online professor positions. The for-profit colleges have employed myriad numbers of online adjunct instructor for the last decade, and the academics that mastered the various digital interfaces that represent the online degree program on the internet have given themselves a head start in earning multiple online adjunct income streams. The best search strategy for actually locating online adjunct jobs is the individual websites of the state colleges, for-profit colleges, four-year universities and community colleges. Every post-secondary academic institution today has a fully functional web presence, and on that academic website’s first page there is a link that will lead the prospective online teaching instructor to the school’s faculty application section. Once in that section of the college or university website, it is a simple matter to submit evidence of the graduate degree and classroom experience. Of course, already having a few online college courses in an online teaching portfolio is definitely a plus for the online faculty applicant, but the need by community colleges and universities for an online adjunct instructor that learn how to navigate the school’s online degree programs is so great that practically every academic has real chance to land multiple online college faculty positions.
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