Adjunct Online Teaching Positions Can Alter an Academic Life

While there are countless intellectual rewards associated with a professional life dedicated to teaching in a public school such as a secondary school, state college, four-year university or community college, there are also banes that are unavoidable and disturbing to the educator. For example, very often at the end of the school year a public school teacher is confronted by the possibility of not being re-hired to teach when classes resume the following semester. Traditional adjunct college professors, which now make up fifty to seventy percent of the college and university faculty, working on a physical campus have no idea if they will have an income from the delivery of instruction from semester to semester because the administrators find great benefit in keeping the vast majority of traditional college teachers in the part-time intellectual pool. To be fair, the administrators are driven to employing intellectuals with graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, as migrant academic laborers to be hired and fired according to the reduction or increase in student populations are doing so to prevent being marginalized themselves. All in all, teaching in the public schools at any level today is a running battle for the educator, which is a distinct departure from the role of life-long public employee that heretofore drew many to the field of public education. Today, however, distance education technology makes online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs easy for post-secondary academic institutions to deploy for their swelling student populations, and as a result of the implementation of accredited online college degree programs the numbers of adjunct online teaching positions that can alter an academic life are growing at an exponential rate.

The now ubiquitous personal computer is changing the academic labor model. The academic administrators that so enjoy a labor force with graduate degrees that can be hired or not hired on the fly, so to speak, and the almost instant installation and distribution of online degree programs that can be accessed by new and returning college students from their laptops causes a genuine need for academics with both academic credentials and superior computer skills. The idea is that teachers with graduate degrees can be hired to coordinate six to ten online college classes at one time and the burden for managing that online teaching schedule falls almost entirely on the shoulders of the educators, not the administrators. At first glance, this many seem like a raw deal for the college teachers since there is no apparent commitment from the individual college, university or for-profit school for benefits other than the flat amount paid to teach the individual online college course. A deeper look at online teaching reveals that the online adjunct instructor is free to teach for multiple schools at one time. In the end, online teaching empowers the online adjunct college instructor willing to learn how to use a computer to instruct college and university students earning an online masters degree in education, a criminal justice associate degree online or an online bachelor of nursing degree by transforming the public school teacher into an academic entrepreneur managing an online teaching portfolio filled with adjunct online teaching positions that each generate an individual online adjunct income stream.