Undoubtedly, the academic labor market is brutal right now and there doesn’t seem to be any indication that there will be any return to that that golden period when educators with graduate degrees, a master’s degree or Ph.D., could depend on employment in a physical classroom. There is, however, a viable alternative to being unemployed with a graduate degree, but that alternative requires understanding that vast majority of the employment for academics is now located on the Internet with online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs. While many academics do not want to contemplate teaching from a personal computer there is little choice since administrators have reached the unavoidable conclusion that it is much cheaper to distribute educational instruction from a computer server than it is to have it delivered in a physical college or university classroom. In fact, any educator that wants to continue earning what could be considered a decent living from teaching needs to acquire the skills to apply for online faculty positions with community colleges, state colleges, technical schools, for-profit colleges and four-year universities. To not make the effort to learn how important distance education technology is now for the academic labor market is to not make the intellectual commitment to understand the economic future of teaching at the postsecondary level of the academy. Today’s college and university student actually wants to use his or her personal computer to enroll in online degree programs instead of having to spend a good portion of their day or night driving to and from a remote physical college or university campus. This makes good sense for the students and the administrators of the academic campuses. It should also make eminently good sense for academics that want and need a new direction for their careers as teachers.
The very best way to go about discovering a genuine online teaching opportunities now available at postsecondary academic institutions is to navigate the Internet to the websites of the thousands of schools that already half online college courses leading to an accredited online college degree available to their student populations. Of course, in order to do so it will be necessary 40 academic to master the use of a personal computer and learn how to navigate the Internet quickly and efficiently in order to access the faculty application sections of each school’s website. This can appear to be a daunting task at first, but so can the prospect of earning a graduate degree and for many educators today that task was accomplished despite the intellectual hurdles. Any teacher that already has a graduate degree in hand or any teacher that is willing to make the time and money commitment to earn a master’s degree can literally develop a full-time online teaching portfolio by making continual applications for online adjunct instructor positions. The future of post-secondary instruction is the increasing deployment by academic administrators of the accredited online college degree. The sooner an academic needing to supplement income from teaching, such as a traditional adjunct faculty member anchored at one college or university or to completely replace a lost teaching income as a result of massive layoffs, realizes that it is of paramount importance to investigate how to become an online adjunct instructor the sooner online adjunct income can be flowing in.