Traditional adjunct instructors teaching on physical university and college campuses understand only too well the impact of shrinking faculty budgets on the ability of an educator with a master’s degree or Ph.D. to earn an actual living. Now, the massive layoffs being visited on secondary academic institutions that are heavily staffed with teachers who have earned graduate degrees are adding fuel to the academic employment fire. In both cases, the reality of distance education technology means that teaching online can provide a serious boots to the personal and professional economics of a teacher that acquires multiple adjunct online faculty positions. Of course, the trick to transitioning from unemployed educator or underemployed teacher to fully engaged online adjunct instructor with multiple clients in the form of online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. It is something of a shock to the typical academic to view the various schools they teach online for as clients, but that particular view is of paramount importance to success as an online adjunct instructor. In order to gain some perspective on this academic business model it would instructive to observe the relationship between the college, university and community college students and the post-secondary institutions. Certainly, the schools themselves engage the student populations as clients when the students enroll in online college degree programs leading to an online degree in business management, a library science degree online or an accredited online accounting degree. That is, the academic institutions collect fees and tuition for multiple college students in return for access to an online college courses.
In the same sense, the prospective online adjunct instructor should approach online adjunct faculty employment opportunities as a chance to interact with the schools that offer their students online college degrees on a case by case basis with the total online adjunct income as the defining point in the negotiation. This means that the online college professor must continually market the academic and technical skills set to the thousands of schools and constantly evaluate the return on investment in so far as the individual accredited distance learning program requires a certain amount of academic participation on the part of the online instructor versus how much the individual school is willing to pay the online adjunct to teach each online college course.
It is possible to earn a full time living from online teaching if the economic factor of academic instruction is taken seriously by the educator. By making as many online faculty applications as possible every day an online teaching portfolio populated with six to ten online classes in it can be developed over just a few years. It does take a level of focus that is not all that familiar to the average public college faculty employee because the assumption is that once hired in a public educational institution is to be forever employed. The academic labor model in motion today insists that every college educator take the responsibility of determining their own academic employment future by applying for and accepting adjunct online faculty positions as the future of post-secondary instruction.
May 10, 2011
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