The vast majority of college instructors are teaching on an adjunct basis for traditional colleges, community colleges and universities, and these individuals with earned graduate degrees, a master’s degree or Ph.D., are justifiably concerned about the nearly closed academic door, which can easily be defined as the amount of financial remuneration and the availability of benefits offered to the part-time, temporary college teachers, at these physical post-secondary academic institutions. The uncertainty is fully justified in that the adjunct college faculty is being offered fewer and fewer classes each semester, but there is no reason that a person who has the intellectual drive to earn a graduate degree shouldn’t also have the courage and energy to throw open the academic door to online adjunct teaching positions and actually earn a decent living from teaching college students. While the traditional academic labor model is in deep decline, the maturation of distanced education technology is in a state of development that is making online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs a common element on the higher education landscape.
The for-profit colleges that award their students the bachelors online degree and the online master’s degree have given the traditional colleges and universities a model of how to save themselves, and that model’s two primary elements are plenty of accredited bachelor degree programs and just as many accredited online master degree programs plus a virtual army of online adjunct instructors to teach the online college courses in them. Of course, there is all manner of concern about the intellectual and educational validity of the online college courses and the creeping effect of creating so many online adjunct instructor positions, but the difficult road that traditional college instructors face as college administrators hack away at faculty budgets is almost argument enough that the main issue for anyone who is or wants to teach college students is economic survival, not intellectual gravitas. The evidence is clear in that it is possible with the aggressive application of tested time management techniques and a willingness to hone digital navigation skills to the point that the Internet is no more difficult to interact with than a push grass cutter to teach ten to fifteen online college courses for three to five accredited online college degree programs at one time.
Granted, there might be some back channel chatter about the impact teaching online for that many online courses might have on the quality of the academic delivery of college-level information, but most of the questions can be answered by demonstrating the effect of the multiple income streams that can be generated by online teaching for multiple online degree programs. Plus, the new and returning college students today actually want to earn a library science degree online, an online business management degree or an online electrical engineering bachelor degree online from their personal computers instead of having to drive a personal vehicle to a distant physical college campus and sit for long period of time at odd hours of the day or night in crumbling physical classrooms while listening to a frightened traditional adjunct drone on for hours. So, any college instructor who wants to earn a real living from college teaching can throw open the academic door to online adjunct teaching positions and do it.
online adjunct teaching positions