Teaching has never been an easy task, and that task is now made harder by the completely and partial loss of income from public education positions. The difficulty of finding a way to earn a decent living, a real living, from the delivery of instruction is now requiring new thinking on the part of academic. For example, it is no longer possible to apply for positions as a full time public teacher position at a public high school, college, university or community college and expect to continue working in that state-funded position for decades. Today, it is absolutely necessary to respond to the teacher layoffs and the economically terminal conditions traditional adjunct college faculty members work under every day in an entirely new way that does not incorporate the assumption that there is any dependability in working for the state college or four-year university that is subject to a thinning trickle of operating monies. The more efficient approach to teaching is to become an online adjunct instructor for the many online bachelor degree programs and online master’s degree programs. By doing this the academic with an earned graduate degree, a master’s degree or Ph.D., can transform from an underemployed or unemployed public school teacher to an academic entrepreneur with a full time online teaching portfolio containing multiple online college courses.

Of course, a public school teacher can always hope that the golden period of public teaching returns in the distant future, but in the meantime it will be a better application of the graduate degree that was so hard to earn than waiting idly for the faculty budgets to swell again and academic salaries to bloom. An alert, aggressive prospective online adjunct instructor can develop a rotational online college faculty positions application schedule that will produce results if diligently employed on a consistent basis. There are literally thousands of community colleges, state colleges, for-profit colleges, technical schools and four-year universities that are moving quickly to place their entire curriculum on the Internet in the form of online degree programs that can be enrolled in and attended from a personal computer. The new college students actually want to earn an online computer science degree, an online business administration degree or a health administration degree online. The academic administrators are more than happy to accommodate the students’ desires for even more online classes they can enroll in each semester.

The best way to identify online teaching programs that have a genuine need for online adjunct instructor to teach their growing list of online college degree programs is to learn how to use a computer to access the Internet and visit the websites of these schools. Once at the school’s site it is important to find the link on the front page that will lead to the faculty application section. Once in that section of the college or university website it is relatively easy to submit the appropriate academic credentials and evidence of classroom experience. While the online faculty application process requires organization and focus, it is much better than waiting to be rescued by state funds.