Love College Teaching Again with Online Adjunct Employment

It is tough, if not outright impossible, for a college instructor who is working on an adjunct basis for traditional colleges and universities to remain in intellectual love with college teaching these days. The overcrowded classrooms resulting from the mass firing of the majority of other adjunct faculty members and the low pay for each course combines to make a very unattractive academic situation. However, it is possible to love college teaching again with online adjunct employment. The advances in distance education technology over the last ten to fifteen years make it possible for college students to choose from a wide variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs. This same educational technology makes it just as easy for prospective online adjunct instructors to search for and find an online faculty position with multiple accredited online college degree programs.

Imagine how much better college teaching would be if it actually produced a decent living for the individual with an earned graduate degree. A person with a master’s degree or Ph.D. is certainly qualified to teach online, but a person with an earned graduate degree and tested time management techniques and an in-depth understand of digital navigation from a personal computer is qualified to teach as many as ten to twelve online college courses at one time. Of course, the level of teaching for each of the online college classes is the equivalent of the teaching found in the physical college classroom, but the primary difference for the online adjunct instructor is that the online teaching schedule can be scaled up or down at will and the geographic restrictions are lifted so that the online college instructor can pick and choose the location to be in when conducting online classes.

Until online degree programs appeared on the post-secondary horizon, so to speak, a college adjunct instructor was necessarily anchored to a specific geographic location because it was imperative that the college teacher be able to physically travel between college campuses. In some cases, if the traditional college adjunct teacher was lucky enough to live in an urban area with several colleges, community colleges and universities within driving distance, it was conceivable that he or she could have three or four different college classes to teach each day. However, if an adjunct college teacher happened to live in a rural area with only one or two post-secondary academic institutions close enough to be driven to on a daily basis, the economic reality was indeed grim.

Today, thanks to inexpensive laptops and practically free wireless connections to the Internet at many public locations, an online adjunct instructor with an online faculty position can teach for many online college degree programs every day simply by accessing the Internet through a wireless connection. This means that the online college teacher can literally choose to be in any geographic location of their choosing every day. The combination of multiple income streams from the online teaching of online college classes combined with the personal freedom to teach the online courses from any physical location can certainly make a dispirited traditional college instructor love college teaching again.

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