It is time for academics to take the perplexity out of online adjunct faculty employment because it is clear that the budgetary funds necessary to pay full time teaching salaries is being reduced as the economy continues to stumble without pause. Eventually, practically every first year and second year college and university course will be offered in the form of an online class within an online college degree program, and the teacher wishing Reddy Anna to continue earning a living will want to learn how to take advantage of the tremendous changes taking place on the traditional post-secondary campus.
However, before there can be any expectation of success for a prospective online adjunct instructor there needs to be an examination of the accepted academic career model taught in graduate school and how it is currently being transformed into an entirely new approach to teaching at the post-secondary level of public education. The fact of the matter is that the administrators responsible for managing the budget of a college or university must confront the economic reality that continuing to pay tenure-track and tenured academics their current salaries and benefits is not supportable given the decline in available monies from the usual sources. Instead, the traditional academic faculty positions will be replaced with online adjunct positions filled by technically adept and entrepreneurially inclined educators willing to accept the changes in the economic landscape and adjust their expectations of academic employment.
The changes to academic employment forced by the technical ability of delivering post-secondary instruction to millions of college and university students are confusing to many established teachers and new graduates with freshly minted doctorates and master degrees, but this confusion can be cleared up easily and quickly by learning how to think about post-secondary instruction from the perspective of the nimble freelance academic with a firm grasp of how to generate multiple online adjunct income streams instead of the state academic employee expecting to stay at one state college, university, community college or technical school for decades and retire with a lifelong pension.
Every day the traditional adjunct instructor drives to a traditional college or university campus and teaches in a physical college classroom for pennies. Then, if the traditional adjunct is lucky enough to live in a heavily-populated urban area that can actually support multiple traditional post-secondary academic institutions, he or she drives an aging vehicle to yet another campus and teaches college students in yet another physical college classroom for yet more pennies. This is an extremely demoralizing set of circumstances to say the least, and there isn’t any relief in sight since college and university administrators are quite pleased with being able to hire individuals with graduate degrees, a Ph. D. or master’s degree, for practically nothing. Sooner or later, college adjuncts working in a physical college environment will have to realize that the only way for them to actually earn a living from the intellectual effort required to teach university and college students is to acquire an online teaching schedule full of online college courses. It is time for traditional college and university adjuncts to stop the academic grind with online adjunct positions.
For-profit colleges that offer new and returning college students a chance to enroll in online college degree programs resulting in a library science degree, an online project management degree or an online special education degree have successfully demonstrated that distance education technology not only works well but is quite popular with individuals confident about their personal computer skills, which is the vast majority of people today returning to college.
An online adjunct instructor with superior technical skills can apply for adjunct online teaching opportunities constantly because the entire faculty application process for online degree programs is online. Once the online faculty position application documents have been gathered and put into digital form a college teacher can apply to ten or twenty accredited online college degree programs every day. Of course, this activity takes time and effort, but it is well worth the investment since sooner or later the invitations to teach online will start arriving and the online teaching schedule will start filling up.
Eventually, it will be possible for an aggressive online college instructor to acquire enough adjunct online teaching opportunities to teach online full time. At that point it will be possible for the online teacher to gain complete control of the online teaching schedule in the sense that it will be possible to ditch the online college courses that do not pay all that well for ones that pay more money in the form of multiple online adjunct income streams.
As more traditional college, four-year universities and community colleges put online degree programs into place in an attempt to accommodate the educational needs of the large numbers of new and returning college students attempting to earn a college degree or university degree in order to improve their chances at a better career upon graduation, the more qualified online adjunct instructors will be needed to teach the online college courses within the online university degree programs. For these reason it is important to stop the academic grind with online adjunct positions.