The difficulties inherent in academic underemployment and unemployment, which is becoming more the norm these days as a result of budget cuts, is something that has to be dealt with by any public school teacher. Granted, there are some educators that feel they are immune to pink slips due to their years of exemplary service or that if they just work harder than ever before in the physical classroom that the budget cuts will simply slide around the corner and have no impact on their economic futures. Well, the literal droves of traditional adjunct college professors, which according to some authoritative sources comprise fifty to seventy percent of the college, community college and university faculty, will respond that no matter how well they teach or how long they teach, at least on the physical college and university campuses, the end result is barely enough income to hold body and soul together from semester to semester, and don’t even ask about the horrors of not being able to land even one traditional college class to teach during the dreaded summer month when enrollment on the physical campus is at its lowest peak. The alternative to academic delusion for educators with graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, is to realize that teaching online classes beats unemployment or underemployment hands down now and will continue to do so well into the future.
The maturation of distance education technology makes the distribution of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs extremely easy and college and university students are finding that earning an online law degree, an online nursing degree or an online it degree by using their personal computers to access online college courses to be a very cost-effective way to earn an undergraduate or graduate degree. The administrators responsible for managing the physical plants known as college and university campuses are desperate to deploy as many online degree programs as possible because serving post-secondary educational instruction from a computer server onto the Internet is much less financially burdensome than building and maintaining physical college, university and community college classrooms. This combination of interest in online college degree programs by students and administrators creates a genuine economic opportunity for academics with graduate degree seeking to regain or improve an income from teaching students.
There are over five thousand state colleges, four-year universities, community colleges and for-profit colleges that offer online classes to their students right now. As more state funds dedicated to public education are depleted into the future, the schools will offer even more online degree programs in an attempt to meet the educational needs of swelling student populations at the post-secondary level. The best search strategy for locating potential online degree programs that are in need of academically qualified and technically prepared online adjunct instructors is to visit the website of the schools and locate the link on the front page that leads to the faculty application section. Once in that section of the college or university site, it is a relatively simple matter to submit evidence of classroom experience and academic credentials. It is possible to develop a full time online teaching portfolio by making enough applications over a long enough period of time.