While it may not have occurred to every adjunct college faculty member or to many secondary level academics with graduate degrees, Ph.D. or masters degree, there are undoubtedly a good number of qualified academics who have figured out that there is a real living to be made from accredited online education. After all, the proliferation of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs and the online college courses within them must be taught by someone with a graduate degree and the technical skills necessary to access the websites of the schools. It is an unavoidable conclusion that the college and university students currently enrolled in the numerous online college classes are not teaching themselves now nor will they teach themselves in the future, so who will teach the college and university students who enroll in online degree programs the next semester? There is no reason that the online adjunct instructor teaching these post-secondary students shouldn’t be the one of underemployed and unemployed academics that are growing in numbers that was almost unimaginable a few years ago. Granted, adjunct faculty members at traditional universities, community colleges and state colleges are all too well aware of how little teaching in a physical college classroom pays each semester since over the last decade up to seventy percent of the college faculty is teaching on an adjunct basis. So the goal of every academic with a graduate degree should be to develop an online teaching portfolio with six to ten online college classes in it because distance education technology is the future of the delivery of post-secondary instruction.

The academic is new to the idea of online teaching would rightly be concerned about how to go about locating prospective online adjunct faculty positions with the various universities, for-profit colleges and community college. However, there is another question should be addressed first, and that concerns which areas of academic study are most available to prospective online adjunct instructors. Educators with graduate degrees can rest assured that as of right now practically every academic discipline is represented in an online college degree program, and the greatest need for academically qualified and technically proficient online adjunct instructors is, typically, and the first year courses of any online degree program. This mirrors the experience on the traditional university or college insofar as it is easy to observe that the introductory courses are the ones that have the most students in them. Therefore, the alert online adjunct instructor will understand that he or she will have more success applying for online adjunct jobs teaching first-year math, psychology and composition. The best way to start investigating the potential of online teaching as a career path is to learn to use a personal computer to visit the websites of the over five thousand post-secondary academic institutions on the Internet. Every community college, technical school, for-profit college, university and college now has a fully functional website that can be reached by accessing the Internet from a computer. Once at the school’s website is important to locate the link on the first page of the site that will lead to online adjunct instructor to the faculty application section. Once in that section it is a very easy matter submit evidence of educational achievement, a graduate school transcript, and evidence of classroom experience. It will be necessary to make many applications to schools that offer their students an accredited online education, but that effort will be well worth it when the multiple online adjunct income streams derived from teaching students earning an online finance degree, an online accounting degree or an online business administration degree start to show up in the bank account of the online adjunct instructor.