The last thing a recently laid off public school teacher needs to do is distribute the few remaining resources, time and energy, on any attempt to return to the traditional classroom. Granted, the hope of returning to teach in a physical setting is strong and constant, but the reality is that the academic labor model is now changed in favor of distance education and it is vitally important for an educator to understand these changes. The academic administrators are faced with choice between continuing to pay academic salaries, including, of course, extremely expensive health care benefits, for multiple decades to dedicated instructors that expect a healthy retirement package at the end of their long tenure and continuing to pay for the physical plants knows as campuses and classrooms. The administrators simply do not have the budgetary funds now to do both and their only hope of keeping their salaries is to utilize distance education technology to meet the educational needs of swelling student populations at the post-secondary level of the academy. Obviously, the administrative decision has been made to depopulate the ranks of educators in public schools. The question is that must be faced by all academics wishing to continue earning a decent living from teaching students is how to accomplish this task. The alert educator will no doubt notice that online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs are springing up at every post-secondary academic institution. Of course, with the addition of each new online college degree a need for academically qualified and technically savvy online adjunct instructors is generated and must be filled by academics willing to grasp the idea that online faculty positions are worth the effort to acquire them.
The search strategy for discovering available online adjunct jobs is to use a personal computer to navigate the Internet to the websites of the thousands of community colleges, state universities, technical schools, for-profit colleges and four-year state colleges. Each of these academic institutions already offers their students an opportunity to participate in distance learning. In the case of community college and technical schools there are numerous online classes being offered to student populations and these courses must be taught by an online instructor with at least a master degree. An unemployed teacher with an earned graduate degree will be able to construct an online teaching schedule populated with multiple online classes simply by continually making applications in the faculty application section of each school’s website.
While it will be extremely easy for a career academic seeking to transition out of the physical classroom to fall into a state of hopeless resignation over the current budget battles being conducted at the expense of teachers, there is every reason not to view the emergence of online college courses with intellectual distaste and an emotional attitude of avoidance. To be blunt in an effort to illuminate reality, there probably isn’t any time in the foreseeable future when teachers in public education will regain their financial status on the traditional campus. However, it is possible to earn a full time online adjunct income that can equal or even surpass the income lost in the traditional academic setting. The vast network of community colleges, and there are thousands of them today with the majority being in states such as Texas and California, is an excellent market for prospective online adjunct college professors. The way to apply for online teaching positions with a community college is to first locate website of the individual schools, identify the link on the first page and follow it to the application section. It will take some time to learn how to quickly spot the links, but after a week or so of constantly looking they will start appearing easily with each visit. The more important aspect of this process of submitting evidence of academic achievement and classroom experience is gaining a level of mastery over the actual interfaces that accommodate the submission of academic credentials in the faculty sections. This is far more difficult to standardize because each community college can have a different way of permitting prospective online instructors to enter application information for online teaching jobs, and many of these sections are not well maintained by the staff that manages the website.
In an effort to provide examples of these faculty application sections the following three examples are offered to readers.
As can be seen the interaction with each interface needs rapid assessment and a willingness to endure new actions with each application. However, the observant online adjunct instructor will recognize that the majority of the time the same materials are requested for the application process. Simply by pushing forward the invitations to attend the mandatory training session every newly-hired online adjunct must complete before being put in an online college courses will begin arriving in the e-mail inbox. Granted, it may take some schools as long as a year before responding and there is every reason for the academic wishing to teach online full time to repeatedly apply to the same community college until some response is made by the academic institution, but the time and focus is well worth it since online learning programs and online teaching positions will continue to appear with the end of each academic semester.
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