The career confusion caused by the current massive layoffs of academics at all levels of public education is understandable in that the pink slips were never supposed to arrive in such numbers. However, the situation is running its course and the result will undoubtedly be fewer public teaching careers finishing out their durations in the physical classrooms of community colleges, high schools, colleges and state universities. The flip side, so to speak, to this dubious situation, at least for the suffering academics, is to realize that the academic labor model is now irrevocably altered and that the new direction is to seize the career opportunities that result of learning how to teach for an online university. The distance education technology available to academic administrators at the post-secondary level of education makes is relatively easy to instigate many online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs and to distribute access to them to any college or university student that can use a personal computer to log onto the Internet. This ease of use means that there is less reason than ever to continue pouring academic budgetary funds, which are becoming less robust every passing day, in the maintenance of physical college and university classrooms. As a result, traditional adjunct college faculty members barely making a definable income by delivering post-secondary instruction on a traditional university or college campus and recently unemployed secondary educators with graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or masters degree, can and should learn how to teach online for an online university that offers online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs.
Of course, teaching online for just one post-secondary academic institution will not be enough, nor should it be enough, in this day and age of changing economic dynamics. The alert and aggressive academic will understand that employment as a post-secondary instructor is a moving target, and the successful prospective online adjunct instructor will recognize the market direction of higher education. For example, new and returning college, university and community college students are willing and eager to employ their personal computers and their knowledge of Internet navigation in order to earn online business degrees, an online mba degree or an accredited online accounting degree. Further, the prepared online adjunct instructor will easily know that administrators of colleges and universities cannot act as swiftly as their counterparts in for-profit colleges in the sense that bureaucratic hesitancy necessarily slows down any decision making process. This means that for-profit colleges, which offer enormous numbers of online college courses to their student populations, are an excellent source of online adjunct faculty positions, but also that the public colleges and universities are making great strides towards offering every conceivable area of post-secondary instruction in the form of an online bachelor degree and online masters degree. So, the potential for developing a full time online teaching schedule filled with six to ten, or more, online college courses lies in viewing post-secondary education as a whole industry rather than a fragmented, isolated area of potential employment for the intellectual with a graduate degree. The best search strategy for identifying online faculty positions with an online university is to visit the websites of the thousands of post-secondary institutions on the Internet. This may sound like too obvious a recommendation, but it is it is still not a daily part of many educators effort to build an online teaching portfolio.