To say that the academy is a fun place right now is a very long stretch. After all, the budget cuts resulting in mass layoffs of educators at every level of instruction will not repair itself any time soon, and there is every reason to believe that the academic labor force is now permanently part-time and temporary, which is exactly what happened to the adjunct college professors over a decade ago. In that sense, the post-secondary institutions, community colleges, state colleges, for-profit colleges and four-year universities, are providing a viable career replacement for those individuals with earned graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, that can no longer count of the income from being a state employee, a teacher, at a publicly funded school. Now, becoming an online college instructor should be the goal of any educator that is academically qualified and technically prepared to teach online college courses for a living. More to the point in these dire economic times, teaching as an online psychology adjunct, a community college online adjunct or in online adjunct English jobs, which are many these days as a result of the infusion of large numbers of new and returning college and university students, actually is enjoyable and fun in addition to being a way to earn a decent living.
The simple truth of the matter is that distance education technology is here to stay, and with it come a serious need for technically competent online adjunct instructors that can teach six to ten adjunct jobs online from a personal computer. Of course, there is also the requirement of a graduate degree in order to deliver post-secondary instruction, but any teacher now holding a bachelor degree can enroll in one of the many online master’s degree programs and increase the professional viability of that intellectual achievement. By doing so, it will be easy while a student in an online degree program to ascertain that college and university students actually prefer to attend college and earn an electrical engineering bachelor degree online, a health administration degree online or an online social work degree. After all, it is definitely more fun to log in to the Internet from a laptop to earn an online degree than it is to drive a motor vehicle to the edge of town and sit for hours in a drafty college classroom.
The same applies to the online college instructor with an online teaching schedule populated with numerous online courses. For example, it would definitely be much more fun to interact with college student in an online academic discussion forum while sitting on the balcony of a hotel in a resort community than it would to lecture them in a poorly heated or cooled physical classroom. More to the point, it is much easier to acquire additional online classes to teach than it is traditional courses because it is not necessary to arrive on the traditional campus in order to teach for the online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs. Taken point by point, being an online college instructor is much more fun and much more profitable, if such a word can be employed when speaking of post-secondary instruction, than remaining an unemployed academic.