[picappgallerysingle id="98237"]
Many educators today are having a hard time earning enough income to pay the every day bills from their teaching, and the teachers most impacted by dwindling faculty budgets are the adjunct instructors working on traditional college and university campuses. As more post-secondary schools, universities, colleges, for-profit colleges and community colleges, adopt distance education technology, the more need there will be for technically adroit and academically qualified online adjunct instructors, and the more online college courses those online adjunct professors teach over time the more value they will bring to the online faculty positions with online degree programs. The more online college classes the online adjunct adds to the teaching portfolio, the more able he or she is to lead students in online programs to the ultimate educational goal, which is to earn an online bachelor degree in accounting, a mechanical engineering degree online or an online masters degree in education, to mention just a few academic disciplines.
The difficult truth of the matter is that the state governments that provide the vast majority of monies to state colleges and universities have decided to curtail the availability of those funds. The debate as to why this happening will rage on for decades, no doubt, but the result will be the same regardless since the academic labor market has changed over the last decade and the alteration is now permanent. Basically, the academic administrators have created a very low paid, temporarily employed (from semester to semester without any employment security) adjunct college faculty to teach the rising numbers of new and returning college and university students. However, even the impoverishment of the professoriate has not been enough to meet the needs created by continually diminishing fiscal resources. Rather, the cost of building and maintain the physical plant known as the college or university campus is creating even further downward economic pressure and there only response available to these college administrators is to deploy non-physical college classrooms, the online college courses in an online college degree programs, which is made possible by a now-mature distance education technology.
This technology allows the efficient distribution of online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs. These online degree programs are quite well received by new and returning college students very familiar with electronic devices such as personal computers and the Internet they access every day for information. These post-secondary students migrate seamlessly into an online mba degree program, online nursing degree programs and online business degree programs. The academics that will prosper in this digital academic environment are the online adjunct instructors that have taken the initiative to learn how to apply for online faculty positions and to build a full time online teaching schedule containing a variety of online adjunct faculty positions. By developing the skill set to become an academic entrepreneur instead of a mere faculty employee, the online adjunct college professor will gain a great deal more control over the online adjunct income from online teaching and will acquire the very beneficial ability to teach for online college degree programs from nay geographic spot that allows access to the Internet. These two attributes of teaching online, more income and mobility are exactly why online faculty positions have value.