Educators working in physical classrooms need to take steps immediately to repair the rent in the public education labor model caused by the debilitating budget cuts. The steps that are necessary to continue earning enough money from teaching to actually have a decent lifestyle include making immediate applications for online adjunct jobs with online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs. As a general rule, career educators are not taught in graduate school how to transform themselves from a state employee to an academic entrepreneur in the event that the monies needed to pay teacher salaries are reduced to the point that mass layoffs are the result. This missing part of an academic’s education can be repaired very quickly by learning how much online adjunct income it is possible to generate by teaching online for a variety of online college degree programs. This also applies to educators that still have a physical class to teach in every day but want to build a hedge against the possibility that budgetary funds are further reduced in the near future. In either case an academic with an earned graduate degree, a master degree or doctorate, can construct an online teaching schedule filled with two to twelve online college classes simply by beginning a routine of applying in the faculty application sections of community college, state university, for-profit college, technical school and four-year state college websites.

The amount of income that can be earned from teaching a single online college class or even three or four online college courses is important to consider, but what is even more interesting is that there are so many online degree programs now in place on the internet that it is possible to add or subtract online classes form the online teaching schedule based solely on the amount the pay the online adjunct instructor. For example, every post-secondary academic institution is now fully committed to employing distance education technology as a way replace expensive college and university classrooms. The result of this adoption of distance learning by academic administrators will be an infinitely expanding number of online faculty positions that must be filled by academically qualified and technically proficient online adjunct instructors. The alert educators will take advantage of this growing academic employment market by learning how to offer an intellectual and technical set of skills to the thousands of college and universities that need them.

The best approach to building an income from online adjunct instruction is to collect all the appropriate documents, graduate transcripts, letters of recommendation and a philosophy of teaching, in an electronic form so that they can be quickly and effortlessly submitted to the digital interface located in the application section of each academic website. Of course, given the bureaucratic hesitancy inherent in any state school such as university or community college, a delay can be expected when anticipating a positive response in the form of an invitation for a voice interview and inclusion in the mandatory training every new online instructor must complete. These delays should not slow down the application activities of an online college professor because it only after hundreds of applications for online teaching positions have been completed that there will be any online classes offered by one school or another.

After a few online classes are being taught, it will be time to evaluate each one in the light of the amount of money the college or university pays for the individual class and how much administrative activity is expected by the program leaders. For example, a traditional sixteen week class that pays fifteen hundred dollars will produce less weekly online adjunct income than a similar online class that lasts only six week. The best arrangement for the online instructor is to submit online faculty applications is to schools that offer six week online courses and replace the online classes that do not pay as well. There is also the issue of how much time the administrative tasks take each day. Some online degree programs requires constant interaction online with the enrolled students and some schools are satisfied to just have the online instructor answer the students’ questions about the individual assignments. The perfect mix for teaching online from the perspective of actually earning a living is a short time span for the class and a minimum of administrative tasks. Frankly, the intellectual requirements on both students and educators involved in distance learning programs is the same as that encountered in the physical classroom, but the control an online college professor has over the size of the online teaching schedule and the online adjunct income it generates is a far cry from the stress caused by waiting on the traditional campus for the next round of educator layoffs.