Online Teaching Blog

From stay at home parents to busy professionals looking for side work; from faculty who want to solely teach to retiree’s looking for extra meaningful work, the path to getting your first teaching job can seem daunting. In this article, we lay out the specific steps and tools and resources to help you achieve your goal.

You did it. You worked hard, earned your masters, had a wonderful career. Then, you had a family and nothing has been the same since. You took a leave – for the short term or long term – from your day job to raise your family. For many of us, nothing is more rewarding than making this decision and being a stay at home parent. That doesn’t mean you don’t crave grown-up conversations and look outside for meaningful work. When you do, you find employers inflexible, wanting hours that don’t fit with your kids school or extra curricular activities. Not to mention the money you would earn may not even cover child care. Who wants to take steps back in a job when you were responsible for a department or had another professional job?

But perhaps you’d also like a little boost in your income and to share your experience with those managing companies after you. Consulting is a bit restricting and requires travel to places you may have grown tired of during your career. Another Michigan winter? No thanks!

But … Staying at home or working a couple of hours a day while traveling doesn’t sound so bad, especially when you get to decide when you work and when you just relax.

Check out these 5 helpful tips for both instructors and students to create a snowball effect of engaging and motivating online classroom interactions.

Often, potential or novice authors feel intimidated or fearful of the publication idea and therefore fail to pursue what is thought of as a challenging task. Those in academia encourage publication as an element of a successful career in academia whether as an income method or to establish and maintain credibility.

The following article sheds some insights on the benefits of coauthoring and collaboration as a means of getting started in academic publishing.

you’re transitioning from a brick and mortar classroom to online, here are five tips to make that transition a little smoother.

Earning a decent income is dicey for online professors because of fluctuating student enrollment. Per my experience, the median compensation for an adjunct faculty member is $2,500 for a three-credit course. Some school's compensation is much less. Adjuncts who teach four classes a semester earn an average of $25,000 annually. As a result, many professors juggle multiple online teaching gigs to produce a full-time income.

Here is a list of side hustles for professors to make extra cash while maintaining their teaching load.

by George Stanley Reeley, Ph.D.

Little Do They Know

At last, I have reached the top pinnacle of Maslow’s Pyramid—I have self-actualized, and consequently I am living the good life in my dream career, performing the duties of an online professor while working from home. Can you feel my smile? Okay, with this being said, it was a pretty perilous climb (for me) up that pyramid. First, I earned my terminal degree, I guest lectured to build experience, I gave free seminars (for the same reason), I taught for years in live classrooms, both daytime and evening, and I was on the road--traveling many miles—often late at night to do this. After these dues were paid and I decided to become a full time adjunct online professor, I applied to over 300 online schools before being selected to teach with five—a 1.5% success ratio. That’s pretty good, so I understand—and I am not complaining. I love it, actually…but how many of you have heard from family and friends something like this? “It must be nice sitting on your rump all day in your PJs teaching school online--easy money, huh?” When I hear this—and I do, too often—I want to lunge for their throats (from my ergonomic chair) and choke them, but I don’t—rather, I smile and reply—“indeed, I am happy.”