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 21st 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.