February 23, 2012

Stop Missing Class with Online Teaching Opportunities

The fact of the matter is that a traditional adjunct professor working on a college or university campus is forced to maintain a motor vehicle simply to physically travel between several postsecondary campuses just to arrive in front of the college students in the physical college classrooms and earn a paycheck. Since there is no great amount of compensation from the intellectual work performed by college adjunct instructors who are teaching in the college classroom, there is always the danger of not being able to show up in class, and when an adjunct professor isn’t present in the class, the adjunct loses a portion of the little money afforded them. Eventually, the operation of a personal vehicle as a necessary element to earning a living from the intellectual labor required to teach college students in a physical college classroom becomes a genuine drain. The solution to this problem is to stop missing class with online teaching opportunities.

Distance education technology allows an online adjunct instructor to teach multiple online college classes by using an inexpensive laptop computer and the Internet. Teaching online for accredited online college degree programs and accredited online masters degree programs is the only way possible for the average individual with an earned graduate degree to gain control over the costs of college teaching and to acquire more income from postsecondary teaching if that is the online college adjunct’s desire.

The for-profit colleges that offer their students a communications degree online, a hotel management degree online or online paralegal degree have used distance education technology so effectively that the traditional colleges and universities are in pursuit of the means to deploy their own accredited online college degree programs. Just as the online adjunct instructor quickly discovers the cost advantage of using a personal computer to teach for online degree programs with multiple schools instead of having to drive a truck or car every day to teaching for a few physical schools, the college administrators at traditional college and universities have discovered that providing college-level information to college students on the Internet is much more cost-efficient than having to constantly repair and build a physical plant consisting of building containing college classroom and repairing the asphalt parking lots surrounding the physical plant. For both parties, the online college degree program is a very intelligent solution.

College teaching in the past was an option for holders of a Ph.D. or master’s degree wanting to have a secure state job that would never disappear. As a result of the crumbling economy, those positions, meaning a tenure-track faculty position leading to a tenured professor position, are anathema to college and university administrators. The administrators are very comfortable with seventy percent of the faculty being adjunct instructors. So, the best approach that can be made by a person who wants to teach at he post-secondary level is to master the computer skills required to engage students in online courses for a multiplicity of online degree programs and to understand that college teaching is moving rapidly to the Internet. In the end, it is vital to stop missing class with online teaching opportunities.