When college instructors teaching on an adjunct basis at traditional universities and colleges start searching for online faculty opening it is quite normal for them to become impatient with the process. It is not unheard of for a prospective online adjunct instructor to wait an entire year to hear back from a post-secondary academic institution after making an application to teach online college classes in one or more accredited online college degree programs. However, if a disciplined, focused search strategy for online degree programs that have online college courses needing qualified individuals with graduate degrees is adhered to every day of the year the invitations to teach online will come along. The question is how well does patience pays off when searching for online adjunct faculty employment.
An online college teacher who approaches online teaching as an academic entrepreneur instead of a college or university employee is in a much better intellectual position to benefit from the new academic labor landscape. The academic workforce, college instructors, is comprised of a majority of temporary, part-time intellectual employees. This arrangement works very well for the individuals who pay the adjunct instructors at traditional college and universities because most college instructors who teach for a physical school are limited by geography. For instance, an adjunct college teacher who lives in a semi-rural area may have only one or two community colleges or state universities within driving distance of their home. On the other hand, a traditional college professor who lives in a densely populated urban area may have four or five post-secondary academic institutions for which to teach every day.
However, an online adjunct instructor can teach online college classes for a greater number of online college degree programs than he or she ever could in the physical world simply because the online degree programs exist on the Internet and are traveled between by use of an inexpensive personal computer, so there is no geographic limitation associated with online teaching.
This means that an aggressive online adjunct can overcome the geographic anchors represented by the physical distance between college campuses by simply search out and acquiring online adjunct employment with post-secondary institutions, technical schools, community colleges, state-colleges, four-year universities and for-profit colleges that confer the bachelors degree online and the online masters degree. Distance education technology has matured in the last decade to the point that an individual with a graduate degree and first-rate digital navigation skills can coordinate the teaching duties and administrative tasks for ten to twelve online college courses with three to five online degree programs every day from any physical location.
Further, the for-profit colleges have amply demonstrated that new and returning college students are delighted to have the chance to earn a special education degree online, a library science degree online or an electrical engineering degree online from their personal computers at home or at work. This same ease of arriving at the online classroom that the college students experience is a very good reason to be patient while searching for online faculty openings.
