By now, you have a good idea of what an asynchronous discussion is. You’ve read about the benefits of these online discussions, and you probably have an idea as to how to facilitate them. So far, so good. Now comes the next question: what does the asynchronous discussion actually look like? Or, to put it simply, what do you ASK in an online discussion?

There are elements to an asynchronous discussion to be familiar with, and there are considerations when you’re shaping your own discussions. There are some steps that will help familiarize the students with the discussion forum, and there are questions to ask that will generate the responses that will help shape learning and make the class a positive experience for both student and professor.

We’ll start with being clear on the role of the discussion board, and then get into how to craft a great discussion prompt.

First Step: Writing an Effective Discussion Prompt

Iowa State University uses Canvas as its learning management system, and it’s there that its discussion tools are located. The ISU Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching has provided a handy page with some general information that can get the ball rolling: first, what should the asynchronous discussion activity do?

“A discussion activity often works best,” they write, “when students need to articulate their understanding of course concepts, unpack a complex idea, research and debate some information, think through a problem more intensely, or focus on a particular reading in greater depth.” Critical inquiry, reflection, and dialogue: these are the components of any discussion in any fashion, online or in-person. So how to do it?

First, says ISU, you need to write effective discussion questions. They should be short, and it would be best to answer only one question at a time. Make it visually clear by using a large font and bold type. Keep question prompts clear and specific—so that the objective is equally clear and specific. Don’t ask leading questions, meaning don’t bring any personal biases to the discussion.

So what might the questions look like? Here are some question starters that ISU provides:

Analysis questions can begin with, “How would you explain…?” or “Why is this significant for…?”

Compare-and-contrast questions such as, “How does this compare to that…?” and “What is the difference between a and b?”

Cause-and-effect questions are an old standby, such as “What are the causes of x on y?” or “What are the effects of x on y?”

Finally, clarification questions such as “How do we know that…?” or “What does it mean for this to be true?”

Remember that factual questions—questions with single answers, or even “yes” or “no” answers—will not stir debate or critical thought. Make the questions more open ended.

Alexander et al. (2010) offer another interesting and easy-to-remember system for developing effective discussion board prompts. Read our article on their Four Questions Approach for more information.

Next Steps: The Process – How Asynchronous Discussion Work

When you’re introducing a discussion topic, remember to put it into context—how does it relate to the course objectives? Be equally clear with your instructions: how should students answer the question? How should they offer responses? Be explicit—there should be no confusion for the students.

Keep students engaged by encouraging them to respond to each other’s perspectives. Be present: show your interest in student’s ideas by responding and, if the response is particularly insightful, say so! Likewise, if a response is inaccurate or undeveloped, offer your advice. Be timely. Setting clear expectations as to how student responses will be assessed, what the deadlines are, and how long student responses should be is critical.

Breaking the Ice in the Asynchronous Discussion Forum

I would be hard-pressed to think of a teacher who didn’t use some sort of icebreaker. In a face-to-face class, you can easily see why this would work well. In an online course, it’s enormously helpful!

An icebreaker will create connections, and not only between you and the students but between the students themselves. Depending on the class or the question, the teacher can answer, as well! Students want to know about their teachers, their attitudes and opinions, their experience and stories. Share them.

ISU offers fourteen icebreakers—and you can undoubtedly find many more. They do not have to be content specific, either. At the top of their list is the “Bucket List” question. What does the student want to accomplish in life? Let them offer a “Top Five,” explaining why each one is on the list.

In the case of the “Dream Job,” you can draw them even more into the class by asking not only what their dream job might be, but how this particular course will get them there. Down at the bottom of the list is the question, “What is your most beautiful moment in life?” In both of these cases, imagine how this would stir the imagination of the student. They are “warm-up’s” in the best possible way—they help students warm to each other, and to you.

You can offer several questions and have students choose one, having them respond at length (at least two paragraphs, say) and even have them comment on each other’s responses—and why not? Note how this simple device can get the students warmed up to the expectations of the class, too.

We offer more ideas for icebreakers in our articles titled 5 Creative Icebreaker Assignments for the Online Classroom and 5 (More) Creative Icebreakers for the Online Classroom.

Online Discussion Questions – The Essentials

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published a book in 2013 titled, fittingly, Essential Questions—and it is these questions you can shape your discussion threads around. To get at true discussions, shape your assignments to these essential questions, which are:

• Open-ended questions, those without a single, definitive answer
• Thought-provoking questions, which stir reflection
• Questions demanding of higher order thinking, like analysis and synthesis
• Questions related to course concepts
• Questions able to raise even more questions for the students
• Questions that require evidence and justification
• Questions that recur over time

The ISU page cites the University of Wisconsin with offering a number of examples of actual questions you could pose. Let’s look at a few.

A question to promote discussion may look like this: ask the students to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of just about anything. Social media, say, which given the time we live in is an ever-present topic anyway, and so likely one that students think about. Online shopping—which could stir discussion into everything from corporate giants to small businesses to how different the malls on holidays might look if we did that—and so the nature of employment becomes a topic.

To get students to engage with readings, have them relate a specified concept in their reading to an illustration that can come from their personal experience. If the class was psychology, and the topic was clinical depression, then the student can discuss their experience—either from their own lives or even from the news or other media—to create meaning. This makes the class material personal.

Engage students with the library, and remember that this includes digital and virtual aspects of the library as well. Have students seek out an article that relates to a concept being studied, then discuss its relevance to both the topic at hand and even their own lives.

Have students refer to other sources—post an article and have students evaluate it, critically, drawing support from the article to craft an argument, and then have them find sources that support their stance. Be sure to teach them what a credible source looks like!

Another will stimulate student collaboration. In this case, say you’ve assigned students to come up with a research topic—and many classes, especially composition courses, will do this. You can direct students to respond to each other’s proposals, comment on them, and help each other find appropriate, thoughtful topics.

Finally, you might have students post assignment drafts on the discussion board and do peer reviews. This is something that works on paper—that is, in actual classrooms, where students can trade papers and read each other’s work—so naturally this will work well online, as well.

Facilitating Online Discussions – Being the Guide on the Side

The asynchronous discussion board is clearly not the place for the “sage on the stage.” Instead, you can act as the “guide on the side” and guide student reflection.

One area in which to guide students are the areas where they can share: their struggles, their questions, their discoveries, and so on. “What is one thing you struggled with this week? How have you overcome it, or how will you?” That is a good question, and one that may ultimately help other students, as well, were they to read each other’s responses.

Having students think about their own thinking—metacognitive strategies—as well as how their thinking has developed over time will give them a clear sense of measurement of their own capabilities.  Ask students to make inferences about what they have read, and then ask students to think about why they might make these inferences and, finally, how their thinking on the topic has changed over time.

The “Levels of Reflection” that ISU references comes in four steps:

• Reporting and responding, where a student can observe, ask questions, and form opinions, but also provide evidence to support their conclusions
• Relating, where students draw connections between content and other content, or content with their prior learning and even personal experience
• Reasoning, where students engage in analysis
• Reconstructing, where students imagine how the content and their learning can be used in the future

These are methods that enable students to articulate their understanding—and the fact that they are writing these responses will help them when it comes time to write more extensively, as in research papers. They can understand complex ideas by relating it to prior learning, using evidence in their responses, and even compare to other students’ ideas. They can research and then debate entirely on the online forum. They can think problems out more thoroughly because they have more time and even space—it’s not always easy to drop two paragraphs out loud in a classroom setting, given the time constraint—to construct their written responses. They can focus on readings intensely and draw deeper conclusions because the online discussion allows for more depth.

Crafting Writing Prompts

To cite another authority, Dr. Nicole Wallack of Columbia University, there are six categories of prompts that encourage deep engagement.

• Have students simply describe their responses to an assigned reading; what was the experience of reading it like? What came up for them?
• Ask students to think about contradictions in the reading, any ambiguities or nuances
• Have students approach the reading through a very specific lens, or have them focus on an issue that the reading can be applied to
• Have students reread an article, even if only a section: what new insights can be drawn form it?
• Ask students to consider the context of the reading, who its intended audience might be, and how that shapes the information
• Finally, make connections of this reading to other readings, other information

Studies have long shown that memorization is not especially effective—but processing what one learns is. It is the way a student organizes their ideas, their ability to draw conclusions and to identify important information, and to see clearly what they don’t know and still need to learn that makes for educational success.

Provide students with a reading, or something they can respond to. Next, have them reflect on it—your questions will aid this. Then encourage them to create their own understanding, their conceptualizations of the ideas you are teaching them. Finally, give them feedback and point to how they might push their understanding and test their ideas.

These things need not be singular student responses; they can also be done as a group.

Small Group Work

Bard College offers some ideas for collaborative work—and small group will be best. Groups of three, for example, which would be an excellent size.

Groups can work together with a reading to do several assignments. They can craft a question that the rest of the class can attend to, based on what they see in the readings, and then, in the discussion forum, pose the questions. The point, as Bard notes, is to encourage students to think analytically and then to work together to answer the questions.

Groups can do close readings together of a posted text. The instructor can model this in a single lesson, and then put students to work in small groups to draw out meaning. The idea of small groups, here and everywhere, is to maintain everyone’s contribution—no one can disappear in a small group! Everyone must contribute.

These ideas have been tested by various colleges, and they are rooted in research. This is a start toward your creation of a discussion forum. With practice, and with clarity as to what you want students to know—and what you want them to remember years down the road—you can encourage your students to think deeply and work together efficiently.

References:

Alexander, M., Commander, N., Greenberg, D., & Ward, T. (2010). Using the four-questions technique to enhance critical thinking in online discussions. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6(2), 409-415. https://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no2/alexander_0610.pdf

Bard College, Institute for Writing and Thinking. Writing-Rich Ideas for Teaching at a Distance. https://tools.bard.edu/wwwmedia/files/4467673/1/IWT%20Practices%20Online%20Revised%20Paginated.pdf

Correia, A., & Baran, E. (2010). Lessons learned on facilitating asynchronous discussions for online learning. Educação, Formação & Tecnologias, 3(1), 59-67.

Iowa State University, Center for Excellence in Online Teaching (2021). Discussions. https://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/teaching-with-technology/instructional-strategies/discussions/

Iowa State University, Center for Excellence in Online Teaching (2021). Create an Online Icebreaker Discussion. https://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/teaching-with-technology/instructional-strategies/discussions/icebreaker/

Wallack, N. (2009). Focused freewriting: How to do things with writing prompts. In T. Vilardi & M. Chang (Eds.), Writing-Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions (pp. 25–52). SUNY Press.

McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2013). Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding. Alexandria, Virginia, USA: ASCD.

The skills you need to become an online adjunct instructor are roughly the same as that of teaching in any adjunct position, and it also generally parallels the course that full-time faculty must follow in their discipline (though not entirely, either). Teaching online as an adjunct, however, has some notable differences.

To teach online college courses, you must demonstrate mastery in your content area, and it is helpful to have computer skills and some experience with online classroom platforms. You’ll also need some teaching, facilitation, and communication skills. Though you’ll need the right degrees, it’s also true that in some cases, work experience rather than an academic background may be what is desired by hiring committees.

How can you feel prepared to teach in an online environment? And what will you need to emphasize in your CV when you do apply for these jobs? If you have been working toward a career teaching college in general, then you likely have many of the qualifications necessary to become an online adjunct faculty member.

Mastery in Your Content Area: An Online Teaching “Must”

The most important requirement to teach as an online adjunct is a degree in your discipline, though the requirements for that degree often vary, depending on the college you are applying to. That is, the level of your degree may differ depending on the teaching position offered!

The most common requirement will be a master’s degree in your field. In some cases, a college may ask for a terminal degree—either a PhD or an MFA—or, conversely, they may require no more than a bachelor’s degree. By and large, though, the master’s degree will be the standard. In other words, if you have a master’s degree, you will find opportunities to teach online. You may not be eligible for all of the positions you come across (the ones that require a terminal degree), but you will find opportunity.

Other factors may look good on your resume, especially as they relate to your discipline. Are you a published writer? That would lend credence to convincing a college that you can teach writing and show, without argument, that you are fully knowledgeable as a writer. Have you done research in any of the sciences? That could go a long way toward establishing your credentials in biology, psychology, and more.

Some colleges, too, may want you to be able to address a more specific focus. A political science posting may ask that you demonstrate specific studies and expertise in cultures like China or the Middle East. A literature class may want you to be able to address racial or feminist theories. These will be contained in the postings that the college publishes for the positions they offer.

To break into education, therefore, you will need education. Now, what else will you need? A grounding in tech, for one.

Technology Skills Needed for Teaching Online

Clearly, having a high comfort level with technology—the Internet and modern software—is a prerequisite for any teaching position in the 21^st century, and it is only more so for the online adjunct faculty. The ability to use a computer in all its facets is paramount, and there are numerous specific software programs you will need to be familiar with.

College classes will all likely use some form of learning management system, an LMS. Canvas, Blackboard, and Google Classroom are a few that come quickly to mind. The ability to use these systems to store grades and assignments, regulate discussions, and communicate with students is expected. Today’s college students have more or less grown hand-in-hand with technology; they will expect it to be used efficiently.

Demonstrated proficiency with software that helps build a class is also important. The Microsoft Office Suite is standard. Microsoft Word, for one, can be used as the standardized word processing template for assignments. PowerPoint can be used to show visual aids for lectures and discussions. In some cases, Outlook may be the standard form of communication between students and the teacher—and between faculty and administration.

The class itself will be held over the Internet, which demands practical experience with operating video systems if you’re doing a live class—WebX, Teams, and Zoom are by now household words—and troubleshooting when inevitable problems arise. Email is, of course, the main form of communication in remote learning. Emailing a student back within a reasonable time brings up another issue with technology—organization.

Organization is important to teaching, of course, but it is incredibly important when teaching online. There are emails to sort, assignments and grades to post, and video feed classes to get rolling on time. It’s one thing to show up in a physical classroom and collect assignments written on actual paper; it is another thing entirely to maintain the flow of a class virtually. You would be wise to back everything up on a thumb drive and an external hard drive—twice! Save all emails. And constantly keep the learning management platform updated.

Communication and Facilitation in the Online Classroom

As teachers, we communicate with students and facilitate class activities. Though some may call communication and facilitation “soft” skills, to the online adjunct lecturer, they are as “hard” as they come. Communication is incredibly important in a situation where you will most likely never meet your student in person, and facilitating a course completely via computer screens is in no way as simple as teaching at the head of a classroom. Even “office hours” must be redefined when there is no office!

Your communication skills should demonstrate facility in at least two areas: communicating with the class as a whole and communicating with individual students. You certainly must have the wherewithal to be responsive to students over the Internet. You should demonstrate to a potential employer—and they will likely ask about this in an interview—that you have a system in place to communicate with students through email in a fair and timely manner, and that you also can do so through a learning management system, where comments on student work can be submitted and stored.

This leads naturally to the skill of facilitation. Facilitating discussions in a brick-and-mortar classroom with desks and white boards is a challenge enough, but doing so on a single screen where there are perhaps around twenty-four heads is not only another ball game, it’s an entirely different field altogether.

The ability to facilitate an orderly discussion over a video feed is but one challenge; another is leading a conversation entirely through discussion forums. The ability to adequately monitor a discussion board and be responsive to student queries and ideas, as well as simply stirring the pot enough so that the discussion is productive, takes a great deal of practice and patience. Having some such practice in hand gives you a leg up, as it were, in securing a contract for an online class for a semester—or more.

Classroom Experience – How Important is it for Teaching Online?

This probably goes without saying, but one of the things you need to teach is simply teaching experience. That needn’t be online teaching necessarily but teaching in general is either a requirement or strongly preferred.

Having taught at the college level is one large step. Having that experience will give hiring committees the knowledge they need: that you have taught at the rigor required of the college student. Some colleges will require that you have taught at the college level for at least a year, and you will likely find that this is the case for, especially, four-year institutions.

That said, you may have taught something other than college. A high school teacher can teach at the community-college level, for example. Teaching high school students (juniors and seniors being an excellent example), especially if you have taught AP classes, requires a short leap to teaching traditional first-year college students—by traditional, I mean 18- or 19-year-olds.

But community colleges—and four-year institutions, increasingly—are now attended largely by nontraditional students, which is to say, adults. Teaching experience in something like community education (and many community ed programs are sponsored by colleges, though they can also be supported by city parks and recreation departments or nonprofit community centers) is teaching experience du jour. It shows you can design and facilitate a course of interest to adults and non-matriculating students alike.

Note, too, that being a teaching assistant (TA) can be usable experience, as well. Being a TA often requires evaluating student work—i.e., grading papers—and preparing materials for lectures, including assignments. Being a TA is substantive work.

There are also ways to highlight your corporate teaching/training experience as relevant teaching work. Mentorship of employees, coaching, and teaching of within-company training courses provide evidence of your teaching ability and should also be highlighted in your application package.

Course Creation Experience – A Helpful Addition to an Online Teaching CV

There are some colleges that use a readymade curriculum for classes they offer. Granted, this makes the job easier for the online adjunct. But many schools may offer, instead, a rough outline of expectations, such as the requirement of four essays for an introductory composition course. Some provide a specific textbook but no indication on what exactly to use from it. This eases the need to make choices, but still offers freedom, though that freedom comes with a cost!

The cost is that the instructor will more often than not have to design the curriculum (even if it’s shaped around a specific textbook and course requirements) in terms of lesson plans, lecture topics, and so on. This will all be detailed on the syllabus, and that syllabus will be submitted, invariably I should think, to the department you are teaching for.

If you have created courses before—which means, as well, that you’ve created a syllabus, along with its accompanying lesson plans, assignments, and activities—then that is something to keep in a portfolio for reference. If you have done this for online courses, that’s yet another boon.

The fact that you’ve taught an online course need not be specific to college, either. The nonprofit Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, offers online Zoom classes. Teaching aspiring writers at a place like the Carnegie Center—and one can teach high school students and adults alike there—is experience in teaching that matters.

Work Experience Counts for Online Teaching

There are cases where being an academic will not be the deciding factor in whether you are offered an online course to teach for a college. In many cases, it is professional experience that counts. Nursing, for example.

To teach nursing, you will need to be a Registered Nurse, an RN. That is completely understandable; after all, if you are an RN, you went through your education to work rather than teach, and in any case, it is the direct work experience that is going to be most valuable for your students! Your real-life scenarios will be invaluable.

St. Thomas University in Florida, for example, offers adjunct jobs in their online nursing program. You will need a degree—an MSN—but you will also need an RN license in the state of Florida and two years of clinical experience as an RN. They also expect three professional references, which naturally makes perfect sense.

West Virginia Junior College requires far more. They require a graduate degree in nursing but will accept a bachelor’s degree in nursing, provided you be enrolled in a graduate program within one year of employment as a faculty member or two years of direct care patient experience for part-time faculty. They further require three years of occupational experience, a current RN license (or privilege to practice) that meets the requirements of the West Virginia Board of Nursing. There are further requirements to determine competency to teach, as well.

Law enforcement, accounting, psychology, dentistry—all of these are dependent upon real-world experience, and online adjunct teaching is often an excellent side gig for professionals.

What You Don’t Need to Teach Online Courses as an Adjunct

Unlike tenure-track faculty, there are numerous requirements you do not have to meet in order to teach.

For one, most jobs for teaching undergraduate college courses won’t require a doctoral degree. A master’s will suffice and, in some cases, a bachelor’s. For teaching graduate courses, however, you will almost certainly need a PhD.

For the most part, you won’t need any certification, though teaching some courses—like, say, accounting—will require a license. In such cases, professional experience comes to the fore. But in the case of most of the standard academics like the sciences, languages, and mathematics, only a degree in the discipline is required.

Nor will you need to publish. For tenure-track faculty, having books or peer-reviewed articles is paramount to achieving their position. This is not the case with the online adjunct. It may be of interest to those who might hire you if you’ve published, but it is certainly not required.

In short, teaching as an online adjunct requires you have the proper credentials. A master’s degree, most commonly. Experience as a teacher and, in some cases, experience in online teaching. For some courses, your professional experience is required.

Look over your curriculum vitae, and look over your work and life experience. From there, you can build your experience into a resume that says you are qualified to teach the minds of tomorrow in an online forum.

To help you shape your application package (CV, Cover Letter, Statement of Teaching Philosophy) into something that will highlight your skills, abilities, and experiences, consider our 4-week, instructor-led course OnRamp: A Practical Guide to Landing an Online Teaching Job.

Online courses are now prevalent in higher education—and that includes two-year colleges, state universities, and private colleges. As such, the options for teaching as an online adjunct is, if not limitless, pretty far-ranging.

You can teach as an online adjunct faculty member at any level of higher education: community colleges, four-year universities both private and public, and for-profit colleges. To determine your eligibility, you will have to narrow your search and look closely at the requirements each college holds. There are limitations ranging from required degrees and experience to your state residency status.

The challenge, then, is to hunt down the vacancies for these positions. Where do you start? And where can you get some initial experience in creating and implementing an online course? One answer would be, close to home.

Colleges in Your City and County

Begin with where you are; after all, you may have contacts where you live who can help you get a foot in the door for teaching online. By way of example, let’s begin with where I am: Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is a municipality that covers the whole of Jefferson County and is home to 13 colleges, ranging from two-year to four-year and spanning from public to private.

Of the public colleges, the University of Louisville is the largest and most visible, a four-year institution, and it’s followed by Jefferson Community and Technical College, a two-year community college. Others, like Bellarmine University and Spalding University, are private but still fairly large and well-attended. There are also for-profit schools like Galen College of Nursing, a two-year college that focuses on, you guessed it, nursing.

A quick search for “online adjunct teaching” jobs in Louisville, Kentucky, quickly turned up two positions at Galen College of Nursing—in the areas of philosophy and cultural diversity. Expect the unexpected! Galen is an accredited college, and one with campuses across the country, and you might not suspect that your philosophy degree can be used here, a nursing college.

As far as colleges in Louisville go, I can also look across the Ohio River to southern Indiana, where Indiana University Southeast and Ivy Tech Community College find their homes. Ivy Tech, for one, appears to also be hiring for a philosophy instructor, and some of the options for that coursework include online teaching.

In all cases, and because people in Louisville frequently teach in southern Indiana, and vice versa, networking is entirely possible.

Colleges Far From Home

Part of the experience of teaching as an online adjunct is that you don’t have to work solely for colleges close to home. You can teach anywhere in the country—even anywhere in the world—and the students will be as close as your screen.

If I shift my attention to out-of-state jobs (scrolling, for the moment, through AdjunctWorld’s job listings), I find that just this week, ECPI University (a private, for profit school with a home base in Virginia Beach, VA) uploaded 17 online teaching postings in a wide variety of discipline areas, including English, criminal justice, information systems and technology, business, and healthcare administration.

Note, however, that to teach at ECPI University that one will need to meet credentialing requirements through the Southern Association for Colleges and Schools (SACS). But this is precisely the investment one might want to make to teach in another state. In the long run, that credentialing might open the door to more opportunities. Additionally, for many of these positions, having online teaching experience is “a plus”, but not necessarily required.

No matter the requirements, it pays to look beyond one’s region. Unity College is an excellent example that has very different requirements.

Colleges That Align with Your Vision

Unity College of Maine is enthusiastic about sustainability. “Distance Education Adjuncts” teach a number of their courses remotely. If you, too, hold environmental sustainability as a value, then you may want to look into a college like Unity, who, historically, posts open online adjunct positions in a wide variety of discipline areas. In other words, Unity College not only offers sustainability-specific courses, but also seeks distance educators to teach Spanish, communications, mathematics, and chemistry. Talk about a common vision!

Also, within each discipline area, there are a variety of courses one could teach – and at Unity, these courses would have an environmental conservationist lean. For example, under the umbrella of “Communications” one could teach Environmental Communication, Crisis Communication, Writing for Environmental Professionals, and more. Same with “Biology,” which includes Conservation Biology, Ecology and Evolution, Biodiversity, and more. If conservation is of deep interest to you, then this would lend your teaching a pointed purpose.

Religious schools also, as you might suspect, hold their values in esteem. Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, is a private Evangelical college that expects its faculty to adhere to a Christian worldview. The potential candidate must consider this when applying to teach any of its number of online courses, including business, healthcare administration, and information systems. For some, this may be a limitation, and for others, an opportunity.

Experience, and How to Get it

An online job search turned up a call for teaching applicants from Monroe College in the Bronx for its Master of Public Administration program. Three roles are offered in what could be an entirely online class, though the requirements to teach—it is a graduate program, after all—are quite stringent.

Being a specific program, a master’s degree in public administration, or an equivalent area, is required, as well as five years—or more!—of teaching at the master’s level in an online setting, in addition to professional experience of at least three years.

But Villanova University in Philadelphia is hiring in the same field for its online undergraduate and graduate programs and its requirements are not as stringent. Its minimum qualifications call for having an MPA or a master’s degree in a related field—but having taught isn’t required at all! Rather, it is a “preferred” qualification, but even there a specific number of years isn’t detailed.

While the Monroe College position may seem extreme in its requirements, I point it out to suggest that, for a position like Villanova which is perhaps less demanding in its requirements, one might be able to begin now to build experience in teaching online. How?

Designing Your Own Online Course for Experience

Creating your own course can help you hone your skills in course development, teaching skills, and time management. It’s a good way to dip your toe in the proverbial water!

Platforms like Thinkific—which boasts more than 50,000 course creators—or MoodleCloud, an open-source platform, or Teachable (they boast more than 100,000 course creators), to name several brand names, each allow you to create course content and deliver it in an online learning platform.

Sharing what you love, even with a small group to begin, will give you a taste of what teaching in an online environment might be like, whether that’s a good fit for you, and best of all, how to do it so that it works for you and your students.

Where Can You Teach Online? Start the Job Search

An astonishing number of online adjunct faculty jobs are posted on any number of job boards online. Just this week alone, AdjunctWorld uploaded 56 online adjunct teaching jobs to its job search database, from 25 different college and universities.

What each school requires must be researched, of course, but this will begin to give you a sense of where the jobs lie. It seems important at this point to mention that the first place you might want to teach is a college that actively recruits teachers who don’t have tons of experience! Small colleges in rural areas, for example, may struggle to find good teachers—and you may fit their bill. Working at a college for even a year gives you a big step up in the hiring process. Three years, even better.

In any regard, start now. Begin with researching and get a clear sense of requirements, then work to meet those requirements. So long as they line up with your vision, your pursuit will not be in vain!

According to ZipRecruiter, as of September 15, 2021, the average annual pay for an online adjunct faculty is $63,542. To put that in perspective, ZipRecruiter points out that this might work out to be a little over $30 an hour.

Given the average pay—and one can certainly earn less, or even significantly more—it is entirely possible to maintain a career of teaching online courses as an adjunct instructor in higher education. (See our article titled How Much Money Does an Adjunct Make Teaching Online? for more information). The need for faculty to teach online courses is growing, as well, and this promises more jobs in the future.

There are many factors that determine whether being an online adjunct faculty can make you a decent living. You’ll need to do some research, naturally. That said, you are not limited in what you can do. Here are some examples.

Teach Further Away Than You Imagine

Let’s look at Brigham Young University’s Idaho campus. In a page dedicated to becoming an online instructor for BYU-Idaho, they make a case for a career teaching in an online format. Granted, to teach at BYU-Idaho, you must be a member of the Mormon church, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you are. What do they offer?

For one, the online adjunct faculty does not develop curriculum. There is no need to design or maintain a course—it’s entirely taken care of by the university. Likewise, there is no preparation of lesson plans or lectures that fall on the instructor’s shoulders. The teacher does, however, lead discussions and grade assignments. As an instructor, you would learn how to do all this via a paid training.

BYU-Idaho pays $1,150 per credit if you have at least a master’s degree, and $1,050 if you have a bachelor’s degree—which means, of course, you don’t need a master’s to start teaching. You’ll likely find that this pay is fairly generous, in comparison with other schools. Add the fact that you don’t have to commute (and Idaho is most likely fairly far from you!), and you will find that this is a good salary.

Here’s an interesting note: you can live in most other states beside Idaho and teach in the BYU-Idaho programs. There are only 20 out of 50 states where BYU-Idaho does not have permission to hire, and those are all indicated on their website.

Granted, the limitations of teaching at BYU-Idaho (most notably, the requirement of church membership) will likely cull quite a few instructors from the pool—or most, reasonably. But that by no means suggests that other colleges don’t follow suit, allowing out-of-state employees to teach their classes. And best of all, as I’ve mentioned, there is no commute. So it just goes to show that a pay rate set high because of the cost of living in a certain city (like San Francisco) or state (like California) can be stretched by living somewhere more reasonably priced.

Online Courses are Everywhere

To look at a school with less specific requirements, consider New Mexico State University. Their “Temporary College Instructor” jobs are, by and large, online—and they will expect at least some online teaching experience. They will also expect some teaching with adult learners (as is often the case with online classes, where students are working and raising families) and experience with Canvas, a learning management system.

For a class in General Education, the posted salary is $4,500 per 3-credit course. These courses, which are 8 weeks, are offered twice per semester. Hypothetically, teaching four of these courses a semester would net the instructor $18,000, and doing this over the course of two semesters nets $36,000. The college specifically says, after all, that an instructor can teach one or more of the courses.

It’s important to note, too, that these are lower-division general education courses, at the 100 or 200 level. They will prove demanding in some respects and less demanding in others. Assuming that the demands even out, $4,500 is close to three times the amount that other colleges might offer for a semester-long course.

Online Adjunct Teaching is a Growing Field

The projected job growth for postsecondary teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, will be 9 percent between 2019-2029. Folded into that number are jobs in online adjunct faculty teaching.

In general—and the coronavirus pandemic proved this—online teaching has become a standard. “NTI,” non-traditional instruction, was implemented across the country, in some cases for more than a year; such was the case in the public schools of Louisville, Kentucky, for example. Certainly, there are pros and cons to such learning environments, but one thing we arguably came out of the pandemic with was an appreciation for online learning. And for many kids who did it, whether in elementary or high school, they got, most importantly, a taste for it.

In that regard, those yet to graduate high school will come to expect options like online learning—and colleges are already following suit by offering more. Adult students often require such courses, which they must fit between the obligations of their jobs and families. As more adults change careers and expand their horizons, more online classes will be created to fill that need. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog, in some fields job growth in online courses may approach 23 percent!

Become an Online Adjunct Entrepreneur

Armed with a little wisdom, and a healthy sense of the job growth in higher education, the adventurous among us can see the possibility for building a career around teaching online courses. We need only know where to look for the jobs, mindful of their requirements. There is no standardization for those requirements, leaving online adjunct faculty with many possibilities. For those interested in pursuing a career in online teaching, you might click to learn more about our 4-week course titled OnRamp: A Practical Guide to Landing an Online Teaching Job.

The online adjunct professor does not work a 9-to-5 job. Far from it. Even for full-time faculty members, the majority of whom teach in a traditional classroom setting, that typical, 1950’s-era thinking regarding the daily grind doesn’t hold true. Still, the typical full-time faculty member has to hold to some traditions like classroom times, office hours, and so on, and those generally tend to fall in a Monday through Friday schedule. This does not hold true for online adjuncts, where the “schedule,” including how many hours one works, can be far more flexible.

The number of hours that an online adjunct professor might work can vary considerably. Whether they even approach a 40-hour workweek depends largely on how many courses they teach, how many schools they teach for, and the amount of work each course entails. It can be, depending on the institution one works for, considerably less than 40 hours.

As an online adjunct instructor, you have some freedom to choose how many hours you work. That will depend on the requirements of the university or college you work for, some of which we’ll look at here.

Office Hours in the Online Classroom

To begin, the first thing to find out is this: What office hours am I expected to keep? Typically, those office hours will be factored in per class. It may be as little as one hour per week, per class. On the outside, you could even figure two hours.

In the online environment, however, that fixed number may prove unnecessary. You may keep no office hours, preferring to respond to student questions via email. In that case, though, you could set yourself an established time of one or two hours per week to respond to students.

The fact is that, naturally, the online adjunct is not going to be expected to keep “office hours” in the way we imagine. For one, they have no “office”! And secondly, the fact that the course is online and, hence, flexible, allows for a different design on the class, where the instructor can allow for a number of ways for students to have their questions answered.

Time Spent in the Online Classroom

Next, how long will your class actually run? If your course is “live,” offered through a feed, then you will naturally factor in the time of the actual class meeting. An hour? Three hours? That depends on the class.

But for those online adjuncts who teach in the traditional asynchronous online classroom there will not be a regular class meeting! There may be discussions held via discussion boards, in which case that time will have to be factored into your week.

Prep Work and Grading

We all know that prep work and grading takes time—sometimes lots of time. The majority of the time spent on the online class could very well fall into this category. But again, it all depends!

Some colleges will offer a preexisting curriculum, as well as assignments. That would save, of course, a lot of time in prepping. If that is not the case, then one has to think about how long it would take to assemble a syllabus, calendar, assignments, and lesson plans. If you’ve never taught a course before, that work all comes up front, but later, you can fall back on what you’ve already created.

Grading—especially if you are teaching, say, composition—can take a lot of time. That said, if you intend to correct every misspelling or incidents of faulty comma usage, you may be setting yourself up for catastrophe. Use evaluation time well; remember that students will often have access to things like writing labs and tutors, and for many instances you can refer them to staff that can help with things not entirely in your domain—library personnel, for example, who can help with research.

Use your time well, schedule reasonably, and you may find that a class need not take a lot of time. Is there a standard measurement? Let’s look at one.

What Does the Federal Government Say?

In order for colleges to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) the federal government set some standards. They are as follows:

In order to give college adjunct faculty a fair shake, the federal government set hours-based equivalents for classes, and these diverge from the credit hours a college assigns. For each “classroom hour,” a college must count 2.25 work hours. Thus, if a class meets three hours a week, the hours worked would be 6.75. So let’s round up and say, for the sake of argument, that being assigned a 3-hour class—that is, a 3 credit-hour class—means about 7 hours of work.

Now add, per class, one office work hour per week. That is also an ACA requirement. That means, in all, the federal government supposes that your teaching of one 3-credit hour class is worth roughly 8 hours.

With this equation, teaching five classes would fall to about a 40-hour work week. You would be working, at least according to this standard, 38.75 hours. Naturally, you can assume that some classes would take longer, but that others would take less. But this may serve as a baseline—how many hours could you reasonably commit to a class?

Organize Your Online Teaching Work Week

One advantage in teaching an online course is that you can really determine your own schedule. Need to take Friday off? You can. Want to work on Saturday for a few hours to make up for it? You can do that as well. Mornings, evenings, in either case, it is what works for you—and also what kind of parameters you establish with the students.

If you are clear from the outset, the students will know what to expect. How long can they expect to receive a reply to an email they sent? We can safely say that 24 hours is a standard of courtesy. In fact, with questions in general, factor in the commitment of perhaps an hour on given days to answer questions. You can even set that hour up as an “office hour,” and let students know when you will be available to answer questions. Keep it regular; that benefits both the student and you!

I say this because the alternative is attending to your class-related responsibilities helter-skelter, which only eats up more time. You don’t want to interrupt what you’re doing to answer a random email, no matter how important. It may be wise to tell students that, once you post an assignment, you will be available for 24 hours to answer any questions regarding it. Then set a time for later in the week for additional questions.

In short, forge a schedule. Remember, too, that you will likely have multiple classes that need attending to. If you are efficient with your time, you may find that you have more time to commit to the class. And that can well mean the ability to take on more classes!

The Bottom Line (Literally)

So how many hours does an online adjunct work? As a baseline, say roughly twice the number of credit hours a week. But to be realistic, if not a bit liberal, you could multiply the credit hours by 2.5 instead. If you’re teaching a 4-credit hour class, give yourself 10 hours, factor it onto your calendar, and stick with it. Then, you could add in an additional hour for the requisite office hours. Let’s say that a 4-credit hour class will demand 11 hours a week of you, spread over lesson planning, maintaining the online class, and evaluating student work.

For a 3-credit hour class, which is a standard class, figure 8 hours a week. With that as a baseline number, now you can really answer the question of how many hours you can work with how many classes you can realistically teach. You could potentially teach four to five classes, for sure, and keep within your time restraints.

Be realistic with your time. Evaluation of student work should be helpful, of course, but also to the point. Even high school teachers know that you can’t spend an hour on a single essay from a single student. If a single class of 24 students all have an essay due at once, that would be a lot of grading (an understatement, I know). So it is wise, too, to really give yourself time to go through the work carefully—and let students know when they might expect the work back with your comments. A week is probably fair.

One important thing to remember is that the weeks can well vary. Some weeks may require little to no additional work. Others—especially if you are teaching freshman composition—will require a substantial amount of time in a single burst. Plan it out beforehand. Set limits on how long a student may meet with you: 15 minutes? Half an hour?

Another important factor is how many courses a college will allow you to teach. Many will limit you to 29 hours, based on the federal government’s equation. This is one of the main reasons that many adjuncts work at numerous colleges.

And remember, too, that much of these numbers depend on what you’re teaching. Some courses will require far less evaluative work, for example. A math class could be set up with quizzes graded by a computer program rather than sitting in your office poring over 5-page essays. Some classes will not need such a tremendous amount of time.

The best you can do is to look at job boards and college websites and ask questions. Be clear on expectations for office hours, the amount of work a student will need to do to meet the standards, and so on. Once you have this knowledge, you can set your own hours and adhere to them.