The Adjunct Alert › Online Teaching Guides › Pay goal planner
How many courses to reach your income goal?
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Set a yearly teaching income goal. See how many courses it takes, how course length changes the math, and how online adjuncts keep the workload manageable.
1. Your goal
We start you at typical adjunct pay from our Faculty Pay Report. Change any number.
2. Ways to reach it
Colleges run courses in different lengths. Shorter courses start more often, so you finish more of them in a year. Pick your course length and how many courses you teach at once. Teach at more than one college? Add a row for each.
Shorter courses cover a full course in fewer weeks, so each week is heavier. Among the online job postings we read that say how long a course runs, 8 weeks is the most common length.
3. Tips for managing your workload
Teaching several online courses at once is a lot of work, and grading is usually the hardest part. These habits spread the work out.
Spread the work over the week
- Check in to each class every day.
- Post in the discussions once or twice a day instead of all at once.
- Grade a little every day. A pile that waits for Monday morning is the hardest part of online teaching.
- If you set your own due dates, make discussions due on a different day than the weekly assignment. For example, discussions due Saturday and the assignment due Sunday. You grade discussions on Sunday and assignments early in the week, and students finish their discussion replies before they turn to the assignment.
Stop writing the same comment twice
- Keep a bank of the comments you give over and over.
- Put them in a text expander, a tool that types a whole saved message when you type a short code. TypeIt4Me is one for the Mac. On Windows, PhraseExpress and the free Espanso work the same way.
- For discussions, save a short note on each key idea that ends with a question for the student. Posting it takes a few seconds.
- Building your set takes time once. It pays you back every term.
Teach the same course again and again
- Ask for the same course every term, and teach it at more than one college.
- Use the same textbook, and build the course the same way everywhere.
- Record your lectures once, keep them on a channel you own, and link them in each classroom.
- A narrow specialty helps, because the same course is offered at many colleges.
Let the computer grade what it can
- Start from the publisher’s spreadsheets. Many textbooks come with them. Change them to fit your course instead of building from scratch.
- Show the formula beside each answer, so grading means looking, not clicking. In Excel,
=FORMULATEXT(B5)shows the formula in cell B5. - Add check cells that read zero when the work ties out, so students catch their own mistakes.
- Add a right-or-wrong cell for the final answer, so students can rework a problem until it is right before they submit.
- Use auto-graded quizzes where they fit, and keep the written work for your own eyes.
Find the courses to fill your plan
The Adjunct Alert emails you new online teaching jobs in your subject up to three times each week. Every lead links to the college.