Harness the Academic Reality of Online Adjunct Jobs
If you are a college instructor teaching at a traditional college or university on an adjunct basis the odds are you are being economically clobbered by post-secondary budget cuts. However, the right sort of intellectual posture can help you harness the academic reality of online adjunct jobs and prosper in the coming years as distance education technology moves the college campus onto the Internet. Traditional academic institutions are following in the footsteps of the for-profit schools by offering their students online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. They are finding out that new and returning college students are very upbeat about the chance of being able to earn an accredited online accounting online, a health administration degree online or an online masters degree in school counseling from their home computers instead of driving their personal vehicles in all kinds of weather to a remote college campus and sit in a damp physical classroom while listening to a lecture or taking a text.
In the same way, individuals with earned graduate degrees, a master’s degree or a Ph.D., can teach the online college courses in the accredited college degree programs without having to own or maintain a personal vehicle in order to travel to a remote college campus and lecture college students in a damp, poorly-lit physical classroom for a mere pittance. Instead, it is possible to earn multiple income streams throughout the entire year, rather than being reduced to near starvation during ht the summer months when the few available college classes are dealt out to the full-time faculty members in order to pad their already hefty salaries, and do so from an inexpensive laptop computer capable of accessing the Internet with a wireless connection.
Imagine having the ability to pick and choose the location from which to teach your college students. Imagine having the choice of which hours during or night you will long onto the Internet and interact with your students in the discussion forums of the online college classes. Imagine being able to simply decline offered online classes for one college’s online degree program because of unacceptable administrative practices or demands and being able to market an education and technical skill set to thousands of other online college degree programs eager for your academic expertise and intellectual honesty.
All of this is possible if online teaching is approached and understood as academic entrepreneurism instead of a simple faculty job. Basically, the online adjunct instructor is an independent contractor with the ability to market his or her skill sets to over five thousand post-secondary academic institutions, including technical schools, community colleges, state universities, four-year colleges and for profit schools that confer the bachelors degree online and the online masters degree to their students upon completion of the core requirements. Ultimately, the extremely low cost of distributing college-level education on the Internet will create a huge digital college campus that can be navigated with a personal computer. Realizing this academic development and engaging it as an academic entrepreneur is how to harness the academic reality of online adjunct jobs and their benefit to the college instructor.
