Online Teaching In Practice

Many academics feel as if their professional and personal lives have jumped the track, so to speak, as a result of massive teacher layoffs in public education. However, it cannot escape the attention of educators that the student populations in post-secondary academic institutions are continuing to balloon beyond all expectations since the general economy stubbornly refuses to improve in any significant fashion and new and return college and university students either resume or begin their pursuit of an academic degree. Additionally, it cannot be missed by teachers that academic administrators are greatly interested in emptying the physical classrooms and transferring the education instruction that occurs in them to online college classes because it is much more cost-effective to provide post-secondary instruction on the Internet than it is in a physical location that requires constant maintenance. The educators with an earned graduate degree, a doctorate or master degree, that realize the potential of online teaching and learn that online instructor jobs are the right academic track for unemployed educators can begin to identify online teaching job opportunities with community colleges, state universities, four-year state colleges and for-profit schools by learning how to use a personal computer to enter the academic websites. In order to start building an online teaching schedule that will generate a full time online adjunct income for the online adjunct instructor it is necessary to begin making applications in the faculty application sections of the thousands of post-secondary academic educational institutions that already offer some form of distance education to their enrolled students.

When a prospective online adjunct finds a post-secondary academic website, the next step is to find the link on the site’s first page that leads to the faculty application section. This section of the college or university website has two functions that are of interest to academics wanting to teach online for a living. First, this section of the site contains information about the online degree programs already offered by the school and the new online college classes that need online instructors to teach them. This information about the availability of online teaching can guide the prospective online adjunct in the evaluation of the school as an academic employer that can be counted on to further develop their distance learning programs. At the same time, these faculty application sections are designed to specifically make it quick and easy to submit records that document academic achievement and evidence of classroom experience. Ultimately, the faculty application sections of post-secondary academic websites are the heart of online teaching in terms of a source of accurate and actionable information, so every educator wanting to build an online teaching schedule should visit as many as possible each day.

The hardest action an academic has to make is to leave the physical classroom behind and transition into online college courses, but this action must be made since there does not seem to be any return to a full academic labor force on the traditional campus. Part of the difficulty of beginning an online teaching schedule is that learning curve that comes with having to constantly evaluate the earning and cost ratio of each online college class in the schedule. This analysis requires the online instructor to develop a working measurement that compares the amount of intellectual effort and routine administrative tasks required by an individual online bachelor degree programs or online master degree program to determine if there is one that actually pay more online adjunct income than the one the online adjunct instructor currently work for each semester or quarter or even every five weeks depending on the duration of the individual online college courses.

To a very great extent, the academic wishing to teach online full time will have to become an academic entrepreneur and employ the same skills in developing the post-secondary education teaching market any business person would when determining the viability of offering a skill set to the open market. These skills are not taught in most graduate school curriculums, but they can be learned by any intellectual with a desire for something less stressful than waiting in the physical classroom for the next round of teacher layoffs notices.