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.

Today, with faculty budgets at traditional colleges and universities being slashed to the bone, and with the maturation of distance education technology, the adjunct instructor landscape is changing in a dramatic fashion and people with earned graduate degrees need to be aware that the schools are making every effort to hire qualified online instructors to lead their new and returning college students in the various accredited online degree programs. In the end, the post-secondary academic institution are being forced by financial considerations to offer the online IT degree, online rn nursing degree and online mba degree to their student populations, and both the schools and the students attending the schools online degree programs need online adjunct instructors.

The first step to take when seeking online adjunct instructor positions is to accumulate the necessary application materials. The list of documents will include a unofficial copy of a graduate transcript indicating the degree was awarded at the end of the course of study. There is no need to send an official graduate transcript in the beginning of the application process. If a person is attractive enough to the university to be invited to attend in the mandatory training sessions each school will require a prospective online adjunct to participate successfully in before being placed in an online class then the school will request an official transcript from the graduate program, and in some cases the school will pay the fee for the official transcript. The unofficial transcript should be scanned into a computer in a format that can be opened by any other computer. In addition, a cover letter, resume and letters of reference should be in a document format that is common to any computer. The idea here is that when a prospective online adjunct instructor locates online adjunct professor jobs there isn’t a moment lost when applying for online adjunct employment.

The second step is to locate the application section of a school’s website. There are over five thousand post-secondary academic institutions with websites, and on the first page of each site is a link that will take the visitor to an application page. Sometimes the link to the application page is named employment, jobs or human resources. Regardless of the name of the link, there is a place on the colleges or universities web site that will allow someone with an earned graduate degree to apply for any available online adjunct instructor jobs. In the event that the school doesn’t list any immediate openings the application should be made anyway. As time goes on there isn’t any technical school, community college, college or university that will not have some online college courses for their students because it is extremely cost-effective to offer an online college degree program when compared to the cost of maintaining a traditional college campus.

If a prospective online adjunct instructor will gather the required academic documents and begin making applications to online university programs, it will not be long before this action plan for online adjunct instructor jobs begins to pay off in the form of invitations to teach online college classes.