Who teaches for $$ and who teaches for the love of the job?

Several recent books and listserves promote online teaching as a money-making proposition. True educators (those who are trained in education, not a subject area) find this new attitude about teaching laughable. No one makes a lot of money teaching. Teaching is like social services and law enforcement: you just can’t make a lot of money in these fields and anyone with any sense knows that. We work in our fields for the love of the job, not for the money. Surely 100K is a lot of money but consider that out of that you have to pay taxes and health insurance and then all of a sudden it’s not 100K anymore.

And consider that you also have to work over 60 hours a week to make that much gross pay. Like I said, people teach for the love of the job, not for the money. But hey, if you want to give up your personal life to work all the time for 100K or a little more, go for it. There are a lot of corporate types who gave up that rat race for a slower pace of life. What’s the good of teaching at home if you can’t have a “real” life and you’re working ALL the time for that almighty dollar?

So you wanna make a lot of money teaching online? You can do it if you’re willing to spend the time. You’ll have to take on second and third jobs, and maybe even fourth and fifth and sixth jobs. No school is going to give an adjunct a full time course load. So you need to work for more schools. But see, here’s the newest thing now with these schools. They are starting to figure out (thanks to these listserves) that most adjuncts are sending out CVs to the tune of 100’s a month to try to get “one more school” where they can teach. And all of a sudden, adjuncts are teaching for 5-10 different schools throughout the year. This causes some reasonable concern on the part of the schools that are hiring these online adjuncts.

Not only does EVERYONE want to teach online now, but everyone also wants to make a living teaching online full time. The truth is, doing that means working 50-60 hours a week or more to provide a quality learning experience for each student in all those classes. The question is, are you willing to give up that much of your time every week and do nothing else BUT teach? That’s not for me. I’d rather not shoot for the over-100K salary, working 60 or more hours a week.

So since the recent books and listserves, now everyone thinks that teaching online is a great job and a great way to make money. And so all of a sudden all these faculty recruiters are receiving CVs right and left, some for open positions and other out of the blue where no position is even listed, and they’re all wondering what’s going on here. What’s with all these people wanting to teach online all of a sudden and how do we know if they even CAN teach online?

Well the answer to that is adjunct pools and lots of training to see who can take the hours and demands and who cannot. Many people don’t even make it through training because of the hours required. I’ve seen some trainings that required as much as 40 hours a week. Others make it through training but don’t get hired because, while they do all the work okay, they’re not experienced enough to demonstrate extremely effective and efficient teaching. Training should be “teaching” but it’s becoming more and more like a “let’s see who can make it and who can’t” type of deal. And the other thing is that these online training courses are becoming longer and longer. One school has a SIX WEEK training course (25-30 hours a week, not paid), and then you have to teach under a supervisor.

Is online teaching a cutthroat business? It sure seems to be getting that way. Now that online teaching is more about the money and not the instruction, schools will need to be more careful than ever in who they hire to teach online and it’s becoming very important to schools to know WHY an applicant wants to teach online.