Online Teaching Positions Create a Positive Academic Career Trajectory

The academic employment turmoil on today's college and university campuses can be identified as a direct result of severely declining public education budgets that are needed to pay full time salaries for post-secondary instructors. Teachers still working on the traditional college and university campuses have a right to feel apathetic about their career trajectories. After all, there is real pain associated with declining faculty salaries and the benefits associated with them. While there is little hope of budgetary funds for public education increasing in the near term, there is an alternative available for clear-sighted academics with computers skills. To put a sharp point on this set of circumstances the act of searching for online teaching positions can cure academic apathy. This release from the despair of constantly worrying about the next round of teacher layoffs results as a growing awareness of the sheer number of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs being developed constantly by post-secondary academic institutions. The popularity of online college degree programs is high among academic administrators that are sincerely worried about successfully meeting the educational needs of the swelling student populations at community colleges, universities and for-profit colleges.

The reason the administrators and department heads of traditional college and universities are so eager to offer online college courses to students instead of physical classrooms is because their jobs and their state incomes depend on continuing to operate the academic institutions with fewer dollars each year from the state. The cost of providing online degree programs that can be enrolled in by students quite familiar with digital media is much lower than maintaining and building college and university classrooms and the absence of students on traditional campuses means lower cost to maintain the campus grounds. All of this means that the chances to become an online professor and actually make a real living from teaching online are better than ever before in academic history.

For example, as more online college classes appear on the Internet, the greater the need for technically and academically qualified online adjunct instructors to incorporate them into an online teaching schedule. The individual with an earned graduate degree is a great candidate for online teaching as a career choice. For example, if a corporate employee with a master degree or Ph.D. wants to stay in front of the looming layoffs it would be a very good idea to start locating colleges and universities that have online bachelor degree programs needing academically qualified online instructors for a particular academic discipline. The prospective online instructor that learns to think more broadly about the subject area in which the graduate degree was earned might be surprised to identify online classes in a related discipline. This means that the aggressive online instructor can learn how to quickly identify online adjunct positions in related academic fields and take advantage of them.

Eventually, an online teaching schedule and the technical skills needed to coordinate the schedule will permit the alert educator to continue earning a real living despite ongoing industry and academic layoffs. Of course, the inherent mobility of teaching online college courses that can be accessed from any geographic location at any hour of the day or night is a perk, so to speak, that can be extremely beneficial as time goes on.

Many educators feel they have been left twisting in the wind, so to speak, as financial budgets for public education fall further than at any time in recent memory. Worse, there doesn't seem to be any end to the budget cuts being visited each semester on teachers at every level of the academy. In order to dispel the unease associated with confusion as to why events on the traditional college and university campuses are occurring as they definitely are it is very important to grasp the emergence of distance education technology and its impact on the careers of academics that actually want to begin or continue providing academic instruction as a way to earn a decent living.

The simplicity of deploying online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs was first recognized by the for-profit colleges; now the traditional academic institutions are engaging this mature technology. This adoption of online college classes as an affordable engine for the distribution of academic instruction can be observed by the simple fact of every community college, state university, four-year state college and technical school providing at least some level of distance learning to their enrolled students. There can be no doubt that the popularity of online college degree programs is here to stay, so it is only a question of how educators with earned graduate degrees interact with them.

Of course, there are myriad anxieties inherent in being a participant in an academic employment sea change such as the transition from the physical college or university classroom to teaching online from a personal computer. For example, it may be discovered that a college instructor is uncomfortable working solely from a laptop computer all day. It may become evident that having to constantly evaluate the cost benefits of teaching online classes for a particular college and university is actually profitable, and if it is discovered not to be profitable for the online professor having to sustain an ongoing application process so that it will be possible to replace the non-profitable online course, at least if it is non-profitable form the online instructor's point of view, as quickly as possible. Granted, there is a great deal of personal and professional freedom associated with teaching online for a living, but there needs to be some serious consideration to the parameters of deliberately constructing a full time online teaching schedule.

The intellectual imbalance being felt by many educators as the prospect of additional teacher layoffs in public education becomes manifest can be effectively corrected by online adjunct positions. The variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs grows each academic year as practically every conceivable area of post-secondary academic study is offered in a digital form accessible from a personal computer. The simple reality is that distance education technology makes is easy and inexpensive for academic administrators to provide educational instruction to ballooning post-secondary student populations, and along with this increase in online college degree programs comes a dramatic increase in online adjunct positions for teachers with a master degree or doctorate and enough technical skill to access an online college class located on the Internet.

Now, it must be apprehended that distance education is the natural product of the universities and colleges themselves. The burden of paying tenure salaries and the associated benefits will welcome as long as there are sufficient funds to pay the required amount. However, as all college professors know all too well the administrators are constantly searching for ways to not pay any more than absolutely necessary to keep the professors teaching each day. As every academic now knows the development of the Internet and associated technologies are the result of a great amount of academic research carried out on physical post-secondary campuses. Obviously, the administrators recognized the cost efficiency of offering college and university students an opportunity to earn an online bachelor degree from their personal computers instead of having to occupy the physical classrooms. Once this cost savings became available the same administrators saw that it would be less expensive to use online adjunct instructors that teach from their personal computers instead of delivering instruction in a physical academic setting. This epiphany caused the furious move away from tenure-track and tenured academic positions and towards online adjunct instructors that could be hired and fired according to the number of students in online college courses.

Now that the transition from expensive tenured college teaching positions to cheap online professor positions is complete the educator working at the post-secondary level of public education can feel justified in making every effort to learn how to interact in a positive fashion with distance education technology, and this positive interact needs to be strictly defined as the ability to earn a decent living by teaching college and university students. The best way to start building an online teaching schedule and reduce the uncertainly of how to earn as living as an educator is to make multiple applications for online faculty positions in the faculty application sections of community college, for-profit school and state university websites. The effort to apply for enough online adjunct faculty positions is not something that can be done without focus and determination, but in the end the ability to earn a full time academic salary from a personal computer located in practically any spot on the globe is worth it.

The point put on this benefit of mobility cannot be too fine because the ability to determine for oneself where to work in invaluable in a period of time when there is little reason to believe that any physical academic institution will continue to function while experiencing deep, irrevocable budget cuts. To put this benefit in focus it would be good to imagine a situation where a college instructor teaching four of five physical college classes on a traditional university campus and is informed during the summer that there will be no classes offered for the coming semester. The instructor will be forced to move to another geographic location in order to secure academic employment as a college professor.

Many educators now find themselves without any income after years of teaching in a traditional academic setting. The reason for this is the deep cuts to public education budgets. These cuts are being made simply because the physical plant known as the academic campus and the classrooms on it is too expensive to continue maintaining in the future. Fortunately, distance education technology has matured to the point that it offers a viable alternative to spending dwindling budgetary funds on keeping the physical classrooms and the physical campuses maintained by allowing the distribution of educational instruction on the Internet. This ability to deploy new online college degree programs every academic semester also produces many new online teaching positions that can be compiled into an online teaching schedule that can generate a handsome amount of online adjunct income for teachers that have lost their traditional academic salaries.

The most productive search strategy for finding available online faculty positions is to start visiting the faculty application sections for post-secondary academic websites. It does require concentration and determination to land enough online college classes to teach each semester to produce a full time salary, but the good news is that the emergence of distance learning programs actually makes it possible to teach college students from a personal computer located practically anyplace on the globe. It goes without saying that it would first be necessary for the academic to secure employment on a physical campus before making the move because as expensive as moving is with employment on the horizon, the cost of moving without securing academic employment in advance is simply something that can be afforded by the ordinary college teacher.

It is important that academics do not disregard adjunct online teaching jobs if they wish to continue earning a living from the delivery of educational instruction. The teacher layoffs recently experienced as a result of the budget cuts to traditional public education is merely a harbinger of further academic unemployment on the traditional campus.

Obviously, an educator with an earned graduate degree, a master degree or doctorate, should be aware enough of the current financial landscape both inside and outside the academy to understand that the real problem with continuing to consider traditional education employment, acquiring a tenure-track positions that evolves after years of research into the treasured tenured position as a career path is the cost of maintaining the physical classrooms on the physical campuses. In response to the diminution of funds to actually operate the campus the administrators are deploying online college classes and online college degree programs as quickly as possible.

Distance learning technology is making that effort very successful, and for the academic the positive result of making large amounts of post-secondary instruction on the Internet is exponential growth of online instructor positions that simply did not exist a decade ago. The best way for an educator to take advantage of these relatively new online adjunct faculty positions is to use a personal computer to begin building an online teaching schedule populated with six to eight online college courses.

It is a serious mistake for any educator to think there is any way to avoid being part of an online faculty since the academic administrators have no ability to increase the number of full time tenured faculty positions in the traditional sense of the position. Educators with bachelor degrees may wonder if it is worth the expense and time to earn a master degree just in order to teach online for community colleges. The answer is certainly positive since the two-year post-secondary schools comprise a vast network of independent physical campuses. The necessary transformation from state employee at a public college or university into an academic entrepreneur that can grasp the online teaching opportunities at even the two-year school level of the academy is well worth developing as online college classes replace ever more physical classrooms as the setting for post-secondary education.