Full Time Online Adjunct Teaching

My instructional practice centers around personalizing each student’s learning experience through a constructivist approach to instruction. Every individual comes to my class (whatever the subject –and I teach many!) with different background, experience, and knowledge. Every individual learns material in different ways. And finally, every individual needs to learn something different in order to master the course outcomes and objectives.

Putting that all together in one package means that my job is to provide personalized instruction based on individual needs within my classroom. One of the reasons I love online teaching so much more than classroom teaching is that I am able to communicate with my students one-on-one much more than in a once-a-week seated classroom situation. I get to know my students’ educational needs and learning strengths and weaknesses and I can teach to the strengths while at the same time, enhancing weaknesses so that whatever margin exists between those learning styles decreases over time.

Providing a personalized learning experience happens in the online classroom in a variety of ways. My favorite and most effective means of immediate communication are the question/answer forum in each course (if there is not one in a pre-written course, then I add a Q&A forum), the informal, off-topic forum (I also add one of these if one is not already included in a pre-written course), feedback on individual assignments (including discussion work as well as written papers), and of course daily email.

I am available 7 days a week for all my students. I answer emails twice a day five days a week. and also guarantee responses to questions at least (usually twice) on weekends and holidays. My students know that if they post a question in a the course Q&A, I will answer that day or first thing the next morning (including weekends and holidays). Students know they’ll get personalized comments and instruction with all graded work. They see me in their course every day either answering questions, posting new info and resources in announcements, commenting in the discussion, or returning graded work.

I have continued 7-day-a-week availability through a hurricane when we lost power and cable internet for 12 days (I had to be creative, but I did figure out how to stay online during that time and only missed the one day and night the hurricane actually came through here ), during weekly trips out-of-state (9 hours driving each way) on weekends for two months to help during a family member’s terminal illness, prior to and during and after quite a few medical and dental procedures of my own, various trips and vacations, and other assorted medical and family emergencies. I never missed a day in class. I speed read and also type over 100 wpm with 90% accuracy and that helps with accomplishing tasks in a timely manner.

I managed just fine in all those situations and others as well over the years and my students never even knew anything different was going on. The bottom line is that you do your job through whatever life sends your way and you do it effectively and efficiently. Every day there are more and more “wannabe” online instructors out there just waiting for the chance to prove they are the best at what they do. The unfortunate fact is that an online instructor is easy to replace with someone else who is or can be just as good or better. It pays to be conscientious and do the job right. 

Here are some ways to
 Manage Workload, Students, and Multiple Schools