Amid the general confusion of the economy today public school educators are one of the groups of professionals that are having a difficult time determining which career path to take now that massive layoffs seem to be the order of the day. There is an alternate route developing for academics with graduate degrees, and that route is being made available by distance education technology and its wholehearted acceptance by college students and university administrators. As more post-secondary academic institutions place their curriculum on the Internet and offer their growing student populations a chance to earn a college degree by enrolling in and completing online college courses from their personal computers, the numbers of adjunct jobs online for educators grows at a rapid rate. When the teacher decides to pursue a career as an online adjunct instructor the benefits can be amazing because of the large market for the academic and technical skill set offered by the online professor.

For example, the full-time online teaching portfolio can contain as many as a dozen online adjunct teaching positions online and the these individual part-time positions will be necessarily spread across four or five different state colleges, community colleges and for-profit colleges. When the prospective online college instructor begins applying for online faculty openings it becomes readily apparent that each of the thousands of four-year universities, state colleges, technical schools and community colleges each represent an opportunity to earn multiple streams of online adjunct income. At this time each post-secondary institution already has some measure of distance education courses it offers to its student population, and as student populations grow in size and more distance learning is adopted by each individual school the greater the need will be for academics that have learned to efficiently engage students in online college classes.

As the online teacher become more proficient at using a personal computer to navigate the Internet in order to interact with the various online college degree programs and learns the dynamics of accredited distance learning programs the more apparent it becomes that online teaching opportunities represent a genuine career provided the effort is made to engage distance education as a academic entrepreneur. Ultimately, the aggressive online adjunct instructor will be able to generate a full-time income by teaching online from practically any spot on the planet that provides access to the Internet.