There is a good deal of hesitation on the part of traditional teachers with decades of experience in the physical classroom to try online teaching as a remedy for the academic layoffs happening in public education. Fortunately, online teaching can be filled with pleasant surprises for educators willing to learn how to interact with post-secondary students from a personal computer. For example, the effort to acquire multiple online adjunct jobs leads to a mobility that simply isn’t available to academics working on a physical campus. The online adjunct instructor can manage an online teaching schedule form any geographic location in the world because all of the academic work and the associated administrative duties are located on the Internet. Further, the adoption of distance education technology is so widespread at the post-secondary level of the academy that job openings for online instructors can be found on the faculty application sections of every community college, four-year state university and for-profit college by logging onto the internet and visiting the school’s website. Additionally, the online adjunct income streams that are generated from a variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs can be scaled up or down according to the financial goals of the online adjunct college professor teaching the online college courses. It will take as long as a year to build a viable online teaching schedule, but the effort will be worth it as educators learn of the pleasant surprises that can result from teaching online for online college degree programs.

It is very important for educators to be flexible when searching for online teaching jobs. The primary reason for this flexibility is that the online adjunct instructor is more an academic entrepreneur with a market consisting of thousands of potential clients than a state employee working in one physical classroom and collecting a single paycheck. Of course, the reductions of public education budgetary funds each semester is severely reducing even the opportunity of continuing to teach on a physical campus. In the face of the teacher layoffs it is prudent for any academic to start applying for online faculty openings at every available opportunity. The best way to search for available online teaching positions is to begin using a personal computer to visit the websites of four-year state colleges, technical schools, community colleges and for-profit colleges, locate the easy to identify link on the front page of each school’s site and follow it to the faculty application section. It will be necessary to make hundreds of applications to teach online for online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs because distance education technology is only now being used to actually replace the physical classroom as the location for academic instruction, but the prospective online adjunct instructor flexible enough to accept this task can eventually build a sustainable online teaching schedule. The real key to transitioning off of the physical college or university campus and into a variety of online college courses that can be taught from a personal computer is the intellectual and behavioral flexibility to interact with distance learning as an educator and a career professional.

Many academics begin their search for online teaching in the academic employment forums, and while these locations on the Internet can yield positive results there are plenty of online learning opportunities that often go unobserved because they are located in the post-secondary academic websites of college and universities. Since all post-secondary academic institutions have websites that contain a faculty application section educators should search for online faculty positions in the traditional academic venues. The prospective online adjunct instructor wanting to identify a potential online adjunct faculty opening can easily ascertain the need for online instructors by learning how to navigate the information about current and future online college degree programs in an individual community college, four-year state college, technical school, for-profit college faculty application section. Of course, it will be necessary for an educator to become familiar enough with the functions of personal computer and navigation of the Internet to be able to visit the thousands of academic websites on a regular basis, but the effort will be well worth it because the alternative is to wait in the physical classroom for the next round of teacher layoffs resulting from the severe budget cuts to public education. Obviously, regular visits to academic employment forums and websites can be positive, but the alert academic wanting to transition off of the traditional campus will want to make visiting the application sections inside the academic websites part of the daily search for online adjunct faculty positions.