The best reason for an educator with an earned graduate degree, a master degree or Ph.D., to start building an online teaching schedule is that there is little if any possibility that the growth of online degree programs at the post-secondary level will be exhausted in the coming years. Obviously, the opposite is true for traditional academic jobs that require teaching in a physical classroom on a traditional campus. The ongoing budgetary cuts to public education is far from over since there seems to be no effort at all of any significant effort to reinforce the monies needed to pay teachers on a traditional campus a living wage for the intellectual effort required to provide instructional information. Yes, it is tragic that the once dependable career path of public education employee is eroded to the extent it is now, but the informed academic should understand that there is a viable alternative to simply waiting for the next round of teacher layoffs. That alternative is to use the classroom experience and graduate degree to teach college and university students enrolled in online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs. The student populations at community colleges, state universities, for-profit colleges, technical schools and four-year state colleges is larger than at any time since the middle of the last century. It is no secret that post-secondary students go back to school during periods of high unemployment and during this period of unrelenting economic difficulty in which many adults are struggling to achieve full time jobs paying a living wage the numbers of non-traditional students attempting to either earn an academic degree for the first time or making a serious effort to continue their progress towards a bachelor degree or master degree that was abandoned when employment was easily obtained is, of course, skyrocketing and will continue to do so far into the future.

The it should be easy for an intellectual with a sense of the educational trends to observe that these non-traditional college and university students would prefer to earn a college degree from their personal computers at home or at work simply because it is less stressful on their time and physical energy than having to drive a motor vehicle to a remote college or university campus and sit for long periods of time listening to a lecture in a drafty physical classroom, and then having to retrace their steps in order to return home to prepare meals and wash clothes or go back to work at a job. Further, the advantages students perceive online college degree programs provide them can also benefit academics wishing to discover a way to develop a hedge against the distinct possibility of additional reductions in the traditional teacher workforce. In fact, an investigation of the evolving application of distance education technology might lead a teacher to decide that teaching college students from a personal computer in practically any spot in the world is preferable to remaining in what appears to be a failing physical educational environment. It could be that it occurs to an academic with a graduate degree or an academic with a bachelor degree willing to complete the course work required to earn a master degree that online teaching positions are actually a very attractive alternative to continuing to teaching in a physical classroom on a traditional campus.

Overall, the primary benefit of teaching online is the ability to work in any geographic location that affords the online adjunct instructor access to the Internet. The reason for this enhanced mobility is that all the academic interaction between the students enrolled in online college courses and the online adjunct instructors that teach them takes place on the Internet. Further, it is possible today for an online degree programs to pay the online instructors regardless of the physical location of the online teaching professional. It is also quite important for prospective online instructors to note that it is not necessary to drive to and from a physical college or university campus every day in order to earn a living from teaching. Given the rise in prices for fuel and the decline in salaries for educators in public schools this lack of any need to spend money on transportation is significant in many ways.

It may be difficult for an educators anchored in one town or city to imagine exactly how online teaching can provide mobility. After all, it is difficult envision a new lifestyle since decades of repetition often blur the vision of a different way of teaching. It is possible for an online college professor to tuck an inexpensive laptop computer under the arm, fly to another country and resume teaching upon landing in the new destination. This travel can be engaged in on any day of the week, and with the availability of wireless networks in airport lounges and waiting area it is even possible to teach online courses during layovers. This is an unprecedented state of affairs for teachers. However, as each academic year ends and another begins the opportunity to earn a full time living or a part time living from teaching online becomes more viable.

The amount that can be earned from online teaching for post-secondary academic institutions varies according to the online adjunct instructor’s technical skills and the commitment to finding the online college courses that generate the greatest amount of online adjunct income for the effort required by the community college or for-profit college. The optimal formula for determining the income value of a given online class is the length of the class and how much the school pays the online adjunct to teach the class. For example, an online courses that lasts only eight weeks and pay eighteen hundred dollars will generate more weekly online teaching income than an online course that pay the same amount for sixteen weeks of instruction. This may seem obvious at first, but it very important to evaluate each online course in the online teaching schedule by the same measurements. After all, an educators needs to earn a living to survive and in this day and age that living needs to be worth the time and intellectual effort required to obtain it. Ultimately, teaching online is more about academic entrepreneurship than it is about having a teaching job.

Unfortunately, this entrepreneurial aspect of online teaching for online college degree programs is simply not part of the course of study in graduate school. This lack of information about how to actually earn a living from teaching leaves many academic today without any direction to turn once the income the traditional academic work goes missing after a massive layoff. To remedy this lack of knowledge it is necessary to come to grips with the current academic employment landscape and to understand how the changes in academic labor are now impact the reconfiguration of the academic labor model. First, there is no genuine will to continue funding traditional academic positions at any level of the academy. In the past, a competent educator could expect to work on one campus for decades and then retire with a healthy pension. That is no long the case for the most part. Today, college and university administrators want to hire academics on a part time basis to teach for a fixed sum of money for each individual online class, and these administrators are quite sure that distance education technology is much less expensive to use as a primary vehicle for the delivery of educational instruction than the physical classroom that has been in use for many years. To put a fine point on it, the online adjunct instructor coordinating an online teaching schedule populated with a variety of carefully chosen online faculty positions is the academic labor model that is now being presented to academics with graduate degrees as the academic labor model of the moment and of the future.