Right now, things are not good for an English professor who only possesses an MA. Like many other fields of endeavor, there are so many qualified applicants for every job that universities, who prefer PhD.’s anyway, have no interest in anything less. More surprising than that, however, is the fact that community colleges are beginning to follow suit, in spite of the fact that a doctorate is no indication of a professor’s ability to effectively teach five sections of Freshman Composition without losing his or her mind. The last time I checked the Chronicle of Higher Ed. jobs listing, there was literally nothing on the board for a lowly MA.
It was only a matter of time, then, before I started teaching for one of the well-known online, for-profit universities. I won’t say their name here, but you have probably seen some commercials for them on television and the web. To begin with, the idea makes a lot of sense. People have been taking distance learning classes since shortly after radio began (perhaps even earlier), and the internet offers the added benefits of one-on-one communication with your professor as well as the ability to use the same visual aids as a brick and mortar classroom. If a professor is using a webcam (i personally don’t), an online student can even experience the body language of a lecture as well. In short, unless a student can afford to live on campus, their experience is going to be largely the same whether the school exists on the material plane or cyberspace.
I found the experience of teaching “part time” for my online university to be roughly analogous to being an adjunct teacher at a community college. That is to say that the wages are insulting, your bosses don’t much care about you, and the students range from brilliant to semi-retarded. However, there are some differences. For example, I find there to be a great deal less political game playing online, perhaps because nobody has to share an office with anybody else. An online adjunct doesn’t have to worry about the price of gasoline, which raises your effective net pay and cuts down on road rage. The methods used to rate a teacher’s performance are woefully inadequate at my online university. They are, however, at least as effective as the eval. process at a community college (which usually amounts to whether or not the dean likes you), if not better.
The main complaint I have about teaching online so far is that my particular online university has clearly hired more English composition teachers than they need and are actively prompting them to compete with one another for classes (more on that later). But, overall, I find working for an online university to be every bit as rewarding as teaching for a brick and mortar community college.
