Go with Your Gut When Searching for Online Adjunct Employment Opportunities
If you are a college instructor teaching at a traditional academic institution on an adjunct basis or an ex-corporate employee with and earned graduate degree, a master's or Ph.D., you may be wondering about the economic advantages of teaching online for online college degree programs. The best advice is to go with your gut when search for online adjunct employment opportunities and trust that you can determine for yourself if they are a legitimate career option. As you search the many websites of colleges and universities for information about the prospects of working as an online adjunct instructor for an accredited online degree program, please keep in mind that the academic labor market has changed dramatically in the last ten years or so, and there is little if any reason to think it will revert to its previous model. Today, the professoriate, the teaching faculty at colleges, universities, community colleges and for profit post-secondary academic institutions that confer the bachelors degree online and online master's degree, is about seventy percent temporary, part-time labor, and the college administrators like it that way because they discovered that full-time, tenured faculty members are simply too expensive to keep around for much longer.
At first blush that labor model for intellectuals may seem somewhat cruel, but there is a perspective that makes it just the opposite. There are over five thousand technical schools, community colleges, for profit schools, state colleges and four-year universities scrambling each and every one to find a cost-effective way to meet the educational demands of an exploding student population. The simple reality for these administrators is that the physical plant knows as the college campus, populated as it is with old, energy-inefficient building that require heating in the winter and cooling in the summer surrounded by massive asphalt parking lots that must be re-paved on a regular basis due to the abusive traffic they endure from all of the personal vehicles parked on them by the commuting college students. At first, the university administrators decided the best way to relieve the downward financial pressure from the ever-increasing expenditures associated with maintaining the campuses was to adjunctify (that's actually the term used to identify the process of turning what had been full-time college professors with great benefits into part-time, low-paid college instructors without any benefits at all) the professoriate.
The Distance Education University Arrives
At first, the financial savings realized from employment adjunct college instructors were enough to keep the college campuses humming along, and the college administrators congratulated each other on their bold and innovative actions. Yes, things went swimmingly, so to speak, for the top academics, but as the years rolled on the college adjuncts suffered more and more due to overcrowded classrooms and insufficient remuneration. Happily, for everyone concerned with the post-secondary education process, distance education technology, the computer hardware and software that produces online degree programs that allow college students to earn online healthcare degrees, an online masters degree in education and an online business administration, degree, to name but a few areas of academic study that can be pursued in accredited online degree programs, was maturing at a rapid clip. The for-profit college and universities understood the positive implications of earning an online college degree and took to it like a duck to water. However, until the big economic meltdown a few years ago the traditional colleges and universities treated online college courses as a mere bagatelle, a passing fad that would soon disappear and not be all that important to the larger higher education picture. Soon after the budgetary funds disappeared almost completely, these same college and university administrators suddenly developed an enormous respect for distance education because it is practically free to deploy when compared to the cost of a physical building that is falling more into disrepair with each passing day.
The reality is that new and returning college students, many of who are non-traditional college students with families and employment responsibilities, actually prefer to take online college classes-online business courses and online education courses-as they matriculate to the upper level college courses because it is much more efficient and effective to log onto a personal computer at home to access the educational material than it is to drive a car or truck to a remote location, such as a college campus, park, slog across a poorly-lit grassy area and sit for several hours in a damp, uncomfortable classroom listening to a lecture by a depressed adjunct instructor or take a paper test. At the same time, the need for online college adjuncts who not only held the necessary academic credentials but also had the technical skills required to successfully navigate the various digital college campuses that were popping up on the Internet every day went through the roof. Practically overnight the colleges and universities needed the adjunct instructors with these skill sets more than the adjunct teachers need the colleges and universities that were pumping out online college degree programs as if there were no tomorrow. Yes, the preverbal academic worm had turned, and it had turned in the distinct favor of the previously undervalued college adjunct instructors.
Attractive Online College Degree Programs
An online adjunct instructor is more of an academic entrepreneur than an academic employee because there are thousands of post-secondary academic institutions that represent a viable market for the educational and technical skills sets the online college instructor has to promote. Further, the online adjunct instructor is not anchored to one geographic location. In the past, a college adjunct had to teach at the schools that were within driving distance of the adjunct's home. Of course, a significant amount of the dismal income an adjunct earned from the one or two available schools was consumed by the expenses incurred from having to drive an old rust bucket to and from the individual college campuses. Today, an inexpensive laptop computer can replace the old personal vehicle as a mode of transportation, and an adept online adjunct instructor can move practically at will to any place that has a wireless Internet connection.
So, when thinking about online adjunct employment opportunities keep in mind that there are not nearly enough online adjuncts currently knowledgeable enough about how to navigate a distance education university from a personal computer to fill the needs for them, and that the Internet combined with distance education software makes it possible to teach as many as a dozen online college courses for four or five online college programs at one time provided the time management skills and the technical savvy on the part of the online college instructor are in place at the time of the application for online faculty positions. The glory days of the person with an earned graduate degree are at hand, and the future of online teaching is very bright.
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Thanks for this article!
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Thanks for this article!
lol...looks like my comment had posted twice..I apologize for that....
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