Making Money As an Online Adjunct Instructor

If you possess an earned graduate degree and you need to supplement or replace your income due to the current downturn in the economy, there is every reason you should be making money as an online adjunct instructor. One of the effects of the recent job losses is an extremely large spike in college student populations, and while a spike in the numbers of new and returning colleges students is a regular occurrence easily absorbed under normal circumstances, this increase in the student bodies of community colleges, four-year colleges and state universities is much larger than anyone anticipated at the beginning the current recession.

Along with the rise in the numbers of students, there is a corresponding rise in the numbers of adjunct instructors need to teach the growing wave of students. However, the maturation of the technology required to provide distance education to students who actually prefer attending online college classes on their laptops or desktops is creating an abundance of online adjunct jobs that require a qualified online adjunct instructor with a master’s degree or Ph.D. in one of the core curriculum areas such as English, math and history.

By and large, an online adjunct is paid a flat fee to teach an online college course for a post-secondary academic institution offering its students a chance to earn an AA degree online, online bachelor degree, online master’s degree or online doctorate (Ph.D.) degree. The flat fee is almost never the same between academic institutions. The fee can be as low as twelve hundred dollars and as high as five thousand dollars. In general, the higher flat fees are paid for teaching graduate classes in online phd programs or for instructing students earning, for example, an online master in teaching. Additionally, The time that the individual online classes run from start to finish is also school specific, and while one school has a six seek online class, another college or university has a traditional sixteen week semester.

While this may seem confusing at first, it is actually a good way to evaluate which accredited online degree programs are a better investment of actual teaching time and effort. The best approach is to teach multiple online college courses for several online university programs at a time and evaluate the income from each over a period of about six months. Eventually, a pattern will emerge and the online adjunct instructor will be able to determine which schools offer greater income streams. Along the way, of course, the multiple income streams from the different schools mount up to equal a decent living, and this income from online teaching carries the additional economic benefit of not requiring the expenditure of cash on a personal vehicle to travel from campus to campus.

Thus, the combination of several paychecks, and in the case of teaching online from a personal computer this could mean as many as five or six different sources of cash for online teaching, with the savings realized by not having to purchase, fuel,maintain and insure a car or truck in order to access the online campuses makes making money as an online adjunct instructor a very attractive career option for those seeking to replace or supplement an income lost from recent downsizing to part time work or outright unemployment.