Land Your First Online Teaching Job. Jean Sibley

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      What can you earn?

      A wonderful thing about online teaching is you can gradually increase your income as you go. You may be wondering how this works!

      First of all, online teachers increase their income by teaching more courses for the same school (but typically for multiple schools), and practicing good time management and leverage. You start off with one course at a school, and you may build up to 2 or 3.

      Secondly, you can obtain non-teaching positions in online education, such as course development, new faculty mentoring, and student advising. Some online teachers start out and/or supplement their income working as quality monitors and course schedulers. As online programs expand, these opportunities also must expand to meet the new demands.

      Some online teachers start out making a modest $20-30K from teaching online, and add to their income as they take on more courses and schools.

      One online teacher reported on a forum that she has only taught online for 7 months and is already teaching 8 courses at 4 schools. She is not full time yet with online teaching. She maintains her day job as she endeavors to build up more classes, and thus more income from online teaching. I would bet that this teacher is highly organized, and also makes good use of grading rubrics, since grading consumes many of the teaching hours.

      So how many courses do you need to teach to make a good living?

      You need to know the duration of courses and the number of students you will have. The duration of online courses is 4-5 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks or longer. The compensation for online courses is anywhere from $800-900 at the low end to over $4500 at the high end. There are many schools with 5-6 week courses that pay $1300-1500, and some have 8-10 week courses that pay $2500-2700.

      Most schools limit you to teaching 2-6 sections per course per year because of accreditation restrictions and other factors, which forces online teachers wanting to make a good living at this to work for several schools. You might teach 2 or more courses (2-3 sections in each) for each school.

      The upside of spreading your skills across multiple schools is you obtain more leverage, as well as more income. This is how you build up your income. You learn for yourself which ones offer the best combination of pay and teaching conditions. One teacher I met online works part-time for multiple schools and made $130K in 2010 (her fifth year of online teaching).

      An Engineering professor I know has a clear plan to earn over $150K. He prepared an Engineering 101 syllabus once and has re-used the syllabus so far for three different schools. He gives quality feedback and meets all his commitments for the three universities in 12-15 hours a week for a weekly salary of $750. His classes are 10-20 students. His strategy is to keep adding schools and leveraging the same syllabus.

      One well-known online professor, Dr. Dani Babb, who co-authored the book, Make Money Teaching Online, reported in 2007 when the book was published that she was teaching 80 online courses a year. Her co-author, Dr. Jim Mirabelle, reported that he was teaching 50 courses a year. Not everyone wants to work this hard, but isn’t it great to know a high income is possible?

      The more familiar and experienced you become in the online teaching world, the easier it becomes to decide how many classes to teach, where you want to teach and how much you want to earn!

      What about benefits?

      At several of my universities, I am on a 1099 basis as an independent contractor. Independent contractors provide their own benefits. Federal taxes are not withheld from your paycheck, but state taxes may be.

      At another university, I am a part-time employee on a W-2 basis. This school has a health plan (which is not the same as health insurance, but is helpful and also cheaper than insurance), and a stock purchase plan for part-time adjunct employees.

      Often, you are a part-time employee with no benefits, although some schools discount tuition towards a new degree.