If you are a teachers, especially a college teacher, you don’t need any more information about the dire economic straits education is in right now because you are living those troubles. What you need more than anything is a way to perceive the changes in post-secondary education and how they will impact your college teaching career. To put it as simply as possible, the academy is moving to the Internet. It’s not all there just yet, but you can bet your course syllabus that it will be in the next few years. The reason for this change in the academic landscape is the unsupportable costs of maintaining the physical plant know as the college campus. A traditional campus is a collection of old, energy-inefficient buildings surrounded by asphalt parking lots. Since the budget funds that fuel the operation of this extremely costly behemoth are disappearing rapidly at the same time student populations are exploding, the only viable alternative is distance education technology.
As a traditional teacher you may not be all that aware of this situation, but one thing you surely are aware of if you teach college students on an adjunct basis is that college administrators have no hesitancy reducing the numbers of new classes, thus reducing your chance to earn a decent living at the traditional colleges and universities, and dramatically increasing the size of the college classes that do remain to the point that students are almost squiring out the windows. The result is that it almost impossible to earn a living teaching as a traditional college teachers, and that reality alone should motivate you to make more money with online adjunct faculty positions.
Online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs are already quite common, but the professoriate is not responding to the need for academically and technically prepared online adjunct teachers as quickly as necessary. This delay or hesitancy may be the result of a lack of the necessary digital navigation skills required to successfully interact with students earning an online bachelor degree in accounting, an online special education degree or a health administration degree online. Granted, it ides take a high level of proficiency with a computer to accomplish the teaching task required by online college degree programs, but in almost every case the schools offer a mandatory training session that runs from four to eight weeks before being placed in an online classroom, so it is possible to acquire the skills to manage three or four online college classes.
For those with the technical polish already in play, so to speak, it is possible to teach eight to ten online college courses for three or four online degree programs at one time. Once that level of academic and technical mastery is reached by the online adjunct instructor, a startlingly healthy income can be generated from an inexpensive laptop computer. Further, with wireless Internet access become ubiquitous throughout most of the world, the choices of work locations as you coordinate the online faculty opening is practically unlimited.
