Any career academic at any level of the academy should give immediate attention to the effort required to join an online university faculty. The academic landscape at every level is under tremendous pressure to do more with less, so to speak, and distance education technology is the key to meeting the educational needs of students without the burden of expensive physical campuses impacting diminishing budgets. This is especially true at the post-secondary academic level, which is why unemployed educators with an earned graduate degree, a master’s degree or Ph.D., should start applying for online faculty positions as soon as possible. It is easy to observe the growth in the number of online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs simply by using a personal computer to access the Internet. It is in the act of observing the rise of online college degree programs that the teacher needing to earn an actual living from the delivery of post-secondary instruction can begin to achieve that goal. Every one of the online college courses within an online degree programs must have a qualified online adjunct instructor teaching it in order to satisfy the various accreditation boards.

There are two primary reasons a teacher with a graduate degree, or a teacher with a bachelor degree willing to commit the time and money to earn a master’s degree or Ph.D., should strive to join an online university faculty with a variety of state colleges, four-year universities, community colleges and for-profit colleges. The first is that the academic administrators of these post-secondary schools admire how cost-efficient accredited distance learning programs are when compared to the extremely expensive traditional university and college campuses and the classrooms that reside on them. There is no getting around the reality that providing online college classes that lead to a library science degree online, an online accounting degree or an online masters degree in school counseling on the Internet is much less expensive than trying to build out and maintain physical university classrooms to accommodate the swelling student populations. Additionally, the new and returning college and university students are quite ready to accept the idea of attending an accredited online master degree program from their computers at home and at work. This shouldn’t be surprising since a laptop and access to the Internet is considerably less expensive than driving to a remote physical campus in a motor vehicle and then driving back to work or home after a long lecture in a drafty college or university classroom.

The educator can take advantage of this confluence of circumstances by learning how to use a computer to navigate the Internet to the thousands of academic websites representing post-secondary institutions. On the first page of each college or university website is a link that will take the prospective online adjunct instructor to a section of the site that is designed to accept academic credentials and evidence of classroom experience. The fact that needs to be faced immediately by teachers is that there will probably be no return to the physical classroom. The future of earning a living from delivering post-secondary academic instruction will be found in the emergence of the online university faculty.