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.

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.

Many students do not want to hear that they have to complete a group project in a course. When they find out that this is a requirement, there might be some grumbling and resistance. Depending on the discipline, instructors might even balk at the idea of having to include group projects in their courses. Essentially, with group projects, instructors and students are giving up some level of control and independence. Group projects have the potential to offer positive impacts on student learning and long-lasting skills. But, when things go wrong, instructors need to be equipped to deal with issues that run the risk of becoming detrimental to student learning or well-being. Like weather forecasters, instructors have to be prepared to predict the unpredictable. This article will offer some insight into things that could go wrong in group processes.

In the “old days” of applying to industry jobs, it was common to find the name of the hiring manager and fire off snail mail or an email with your letter of interest and resume. Back in 2005 when we started helping professors find teaching jobs, most of our candidates used this method: they sent emails off to deans and administrators they had contact information for, and were either sent a rejection note or a reply with information on how to proceed with candidacy.

A lot of what we focus on as educators and on this site is how to get jobs, how to keep jobs, how to expand our workload and how to become an Adjunctpreneur®, if that is your goal. We talk about writing curriculum vita's, crafting the perfect cover letter, having your transcripts ready to send right away, how to impress the potential boss on an interview and how to ask others for a letter of recommendation.

But what we rarely talk about is the administrative side and the repercussion of university bad-press coming from faculty, how seriously they should take it, and what they should do about it when it happens. What we do know is that administrators lurk in our forums and they do watch what is said/thought of about their departments and schools – but my impression is that the lurkers are the ones who care. It’s the administrators who do not lurk that perhaps understand less what it means for faculty to lose faith in their institution – and the long-term damage it can do.

We have a very active group contributing to online adjunct job tips on our Facebook forum. I recently asked the group,

what are your best tips related to getting an online adjunct job, specifically?