Educators Should Take the Calculated Risk of Teaching Online
Teachers are a generally disinclined to take risks with their career plans and this has been an intelligent approach until recently when the severe budget cuts to public education resulted in massive teacher layoffs. Since traditional academic employment is now quite risky in terms of its sustainability it may be time for teachers with earned graduate degrees, a doctorate or master degree, working in a physical classroom on a physical campus to take a look at the calculated risk of teaching online for a living. First, distance education technology is now the engine selected to pull post-secondary education instruction into the twenty first century, and the reason for this relocation of the actual classroom to the Internet is that the operational costs of maintaining the physical campuses and the physical classrooms on them since the budgetary reductions continue to reduce available funds each academic year. Obviously, the creation of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs also generates many new online faculty jobs that must be filled by academically qualified and technically agile online adjunct college professors willing to learn how to teach college and university students from a personal computer. Granted, it is nothing short of a calculated risk for an academic to build an online teaching schedule in order to transition out of the physical classroom and into a variety of online college courses, but the risk will prove worth the effort since distance learning is the real future of post-secondary instruction.