If you teach college students for a living, if you can call being financially strangled by budget freezes and cuts a living, in a traditional academic setting, a physical campus populated with a plethora of concrete and brick buildings requiring an enormous amount of energy to maintain, an asphalt parking lot the size of several football fields to accommodate the large numbers of motor vehicles driven considerable distances by administrators, faculty, students and support staff and a few patches of green space slowly giving what little way they have to every more sidewalks and bike paths , then it is evident that the time is now to change the way you teach with online college teaching jobs. The maturation of distance education technology over the last few years has led to a significant surge in the popularity and acceptance of online college courses leading to bachelors degree online and masters degrees online by new and returning college students. For those with an earned graduate degree, a masters degree or doctorate degree, this rise in student populations attending post-secondary institutions in order to earn an accredited online degree this is an amazing opportunity to increase the income from adjunct teaching while acquiring a stunning level of personal and professional freedom.
Degree programs online are expanding quickly as increasing unemployment is motivating people to enroll in a variety of schools in an effort to improve their employability in the future and as the sheer cost of maintain the physical plants called college campuses becomes unsupportable in the face of budget cuts at the state level. The cost of providing college students with nursing degree programs online and entrance into online masters degrees in education is far less than it would be to offer the same academic platform in a traditional setting. The decreased economic pressure resulting from offering the same academic information online is increasing the range of accredited online degree programs, which means that the need for academically qualified online adjunct instructors to fill a growing number of online faculty positions is literally giving birth to a new career field. That career field is all about landing multiple online adjunct jobs with several online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. All too often college teachers think that teaching online college courses means they can’t continue to be employed at the community college, state college or state university, and nothing could be further from the truth. It is quite possible to teach college classes at a traditional academic institution while teaching several courses for three or four online university programs. In fact, a wise college adjunct would do well to learn how to scale the teaching load so that he or she can earn as much income as possible.
The best possible way to maximize a college teaching schedule is to learn how to scale the traditional college classes and the online classes taught at programs that offer an elementary education degree online or the masters degree education online. The skill set backing the ability to scale online adjunct employment opportunities requires an entrepreneurial attitude to distance education and the online instructor’s participation in it. For example, online teaching is a business, and it must be viewed as an economic formula. It is important to understand that the colleges, universities and for-profit academic institution view their student populations as markets. It is just as important for the online adjuncts to view the schools’ online college classes as a market for an intellectual skill set combined with academic credentials. This is the reason it is absolutely necessary to have an earned graduate degree in hand before starting a search for online adjunct teaching positions, and this is why it is well worth the time and effort to acquire a graduate degree from one of the many programs that offer masters degrees online. Further, it is more advantageous to the prospective online adjunct instructor to have a masters degree or Ph.D. in one of the core curriculum areas of study. These areas of college study include English, history, art history, psychology and math. As an academic entrepreneur it will be important to assess the location of the most online college classes offered by a school that makes available a bachelor degree online because that is where there are the greatest numbers of opportunities. It is where the alert adjunct instructor will learn to scale the online teaching schedule or work load up or down as the required by the financial goals required to make a decent living by teaching form a variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs.
The scalability of online college courses within online university programs is based not only on personal income requirements. It is also based on a close analysis of the length of the online classes and the pay scale for individual schools. Typically, a traditional college semester lasts about sixteen weeks. Many for-profit schools offering a masters degree education online to its students runs from five to eight weeks long. Of course, a number of the traditional colleges and universities are moving to shorter class lengths, so that is certainly worth evaluating the potential of any online degree program in terms of how much an online adjunct is paid over the weeks of the on line course. That means it would be preferable from an income perspective to teach two online courses lasting eight weeks and paying two thousand dollars each than it would be to teach two online classes for a full sixteen weeks because chances are the online university program would run the eight week courses back to back and that would total four online college courses, and income from four online college courses leading to an online psychology masters degree, for instance, would pay out quite nicely at the end of the sixteen week period. However, This exact kind of analysis requires an awareness of the different online bachelor degree programs and the different masters degree online programs being offered by the various school catering to the new and returning college students seeking a college degree by attending college classes online from their personal computers.
Those already teaching at the college level and those wanting to recapture a steady income after corporate downsizing would do well to investigate the potential of online college teaching jobs. Accredited online degree programs are appearing all over the Internet, and they are actively seeking college adjuncts to teach for their masters degree education online, their nursing degree programs online and their online business degree programs. While it will take some serious attention to detail in order to fully appreciate how to change the way you teach college students who are earning university degrees online, it will be well worth the effort in terms of a new-found freedom from geographic restrictions and the sheer luxury of being able to generate multiple paychecks from a personal computer. The successful online adjunct instructor will examine the assumptions about teaching at the post-secondary level and determine if staying in the same academic mindset is the best course of action given the shirting economic landscape, or decide it is wiser and more beneficial to acquire the skill sets actively sought by colleges and universities with online accounting degree programs and online business degree programs that need a qualified instructor in every online class.