Online Teaching Blog

You've been thinking about becoming an online teacher. Maybe it goes something like this... "this is an interesting job. I want to teach others, I have the time, I love flexibility, and the money sounds pretty good ($1,000 to $5000 per course, varying by degree, length of the course, university and discipline). But, I don't have any online teaching job experience. How am I going to get any so I can begin my teaching career?" You are not alone. It's the most common question I am asked about breaking into the field of online education. We have helped thousands of people like you.

Before you begin your online teaching job search, here are some things to think about:

Online education is a demanding profession that is often a 24x7 job. While it is incredibly flexible (you can work from anywhere you have an internet connection!) it's also an "always on" job that rarely offers vacations or days off. If you love to teach, and enjoy the flexibility of working from anywhere in the world, this may be a great profession for you!

Consider these Curriculum Vitae tips before you start writing your CV, which is vital to finding an online teaching job:

1. Remove the funky and cool formatting and awesome headers and footers! It looks great when we print it, but it isn’t HR-system or recruiter friendly. Upload it and watch your data disappear.
2. Length on a CV is unlike length on a resume. Most CV files that I write with little to no experience are at least four pages. An experienced professor might have a 20 page CV or more.

While we are busy storing away holiday decorations and moving kids toys from the living room to their bedrooms (step on a lego this year, anyone? Ouch!), in the back of our minds we are often thinking, “what do we want to do this year that we didn’t last?” I have a personal dislike for the term “New Years Resolution”, because resolutions seem to be more like to-do lists for the first week of January! :) But for many of us, we have a more serious need to secure work and earn additional income in 2014, due to the feeling of instability in the industry we work in and a decrease in workload at some universities.

Ah... as an online teacher, this is about the only week that life feels somewhat normal. Most schools (not all) are on break. That leaves time for reading, too much time for the gym (exhaustion anyone?), too much time for thinking, and for many of my friends in this profession a lot of guilt that they didn't spend that one week of "quarter time" with family.