Teaching Online Solves a Host of Academic Problems

Every educator today is faced with the economic dilemma of how to continue teaching and still earn a living from the expended intellectual effort. The cutbacks in faculty budgets are leaving teachers at every level of the academy in a financial corner as more layoffs are announced and more cutbacks at the post-secondary level of public education are made manifest. A person with a graduate degree, a Ph.D. or masters degree, could be forgiven when asking where does it all end if it continues along its current path. Part of the answer could be provided by traditional adjunct college instructors that have been laboring under the yoke of underemployment for at least the last decade. These academics teach in physical college classrooms every day, but they are paid very little for the effort and they must spend a good deal of their meager income on a motor vehicle to drive between physical college and university campuses in order to acquire one or two extra university classes to teach. However, distance education technology is making very serious inroads in post-secondary education, and the result for individual with classroom experience and a graduate degree is that teaching online solves a host of academic problems created by decimated public education budgets.

Today’s college, university and community college students are eager to enroll in online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs leading to an online accounting degree, an online computer science degree or an online masters degree in school counseling because they realize it is much more efficient to participate in online college courses than it is to drive to a remote academic campus and sit in a physical university classroom for hours and then having to drive back to work or home. Instead, these new post-secondary students prefer to use their personal computer to access the Internet and, thus, the online college degree programs offered by community colleges and state universities. Indeed, for-profit colleges have demonstrated over the last decade the attractiveness of accredited distance learning programs.

At the same time, academic administrators are delighted to have a less expensive alternative to spending thinner budgets on the maintenance of the physical campus and the physical college and university classrooms on it. Student populations are larger than at any time in the last fifty or sixty years as a result of the declining economy. The administrators still have meet the educational needs of these swelling numbers of post-secondary students and distance education technology, which allows the quick, easy deployment of online degree programs allows them the flexibility they so desperately need at this time.

Of course, the employment of technology in the form of online college courses instantly creates a need for qualified academics that are prepared to teach the students enrolled in the online college classes. The educators now facing dire economic circumstances should immediately begin applying for online adjunct instructor positions with the thousands of state colleges, four-year universities, for-profit colleges and community colleges. The growth of online college degree programs and the associated need for qualified online adjuncts means that teaching online is a genuine solution for the educated individual with technical skills.