OWA

How Is Teaching Writing Online?

Maybe something you want to do

Photo by Outcast India on Unsplash

Intrigued?

Are you a writer interested in using your skills to make some money and provide a service while lounging in bed or traveling to beautiful locations? Do you want to do something meaningful, follow your artistic passion and capitalize on the years you’ve spent honing your craft? Teaching writing online might be just the thing for you.

I taught writing for several years in brick and mortar universities before switching to teaching with a university online, so I can compare and contrast those experiences. I’ve taught for a long time online with a university extension program as well as with various other online writing schools.

Let’s look at the pros and cons.

Pros

• Helping other writers improve is highly rewarding, assuming you enjoy people being grateful for the care and attention you give to them.
• Analyzing exactly what makes your students’ work entertaining in many specific and unexpected ways pushes you toward being better at your craft.
• If you can work at home, you can do this even if you have disabilities that prevent you from easily going out in public. And if you don’t want to, you don’t need to bother getting dressed or spending lots of time in grooming.
• If you work from a coffee house or library, you may be able to have a short commute and people watch at the same time as teaching.
• You can travel, be nomadic, be on call to visit family when needed, or remain open for sudden changes of local.
• If you have an English degree, you can put it to good use, and if you have post-graduate degrees in writing, you are more qualified to be accepted into a university program.
• If you don’t have a degree related to writing, you can often teach at non-university schools, of which there are many. Just reach out and apply.
• You don’t need an Education degree if you’re teaching adults.
• In my experience, the administrators are inevitably wonderful people to connect with.
• You interact through websites that are organized and you don’t need to set up your own payment retrieval system or anything like that, as it’s all done for you and the bugs are already worked out.
• You don’t need to find your own students. They find you or find the school. This saves a tremendous amount of marketing time and money. And if you are reasonably known as a writer due to books and magazine and anthology publications, and get good reviews as a teacher, students may pick you to take a course with if they resonate with your style. Then, they may continue taking classes from you if they got a lot out of the first class.
• You’ll be constantly surprised by wonderful writing. You get to read your chosen genre regularly and get paid to do so. Some assignments require few suggestions for improvement. You get to praise them enthusiastically. Just be sensitive to how that makes other students feel if they aren’t doing as good a job. Be sure to point all your feedback to the writing itself, not the writer, so no one takes it personally.
• You can decide when you want to teach. If you prefer to take a quarter off, you can say no when asked about availability for future scheduling. However, courses are scheduled several months ahead of time.
• You can create a new course that the school never offered before. That gives students with that interest the opportunity to learn from you in ways they can’t find elsewhere. Exciting for them!
• You develop warn connections with all the administrators you communicate with and with all the students class after class. It’s a great bonding experience. You aren’t expected to be as distanced as a math teacher, as tough as a law teacher, and the students are there because they want to be. You can express your love and affection and students enjoy that.
• Since you’re expected to be creative as a writer, you can have fun with your lectures, with playful, imaginative or profound prose.
• Your schedule is flexible if you teach courses without set meeting times. Your students may be all over the world and studying after they get home from their jobs, so most courses don’t have specific times everyone must come together. However, some classes, particularly if they are not university affiliated, do require webinars.
• You can look back on your rich life as an instructor and feel proud of all the lives you’ve improved. While your life may not look exciting from the outside, as you type away all day, you reach people who prioritize their artistic passions and get published enhance the lives of their readers.

Cons

• For adjuncts, the pay is extremely low and there are no “benefits.” A ten-week class with fifteen students might pay $2,500, and there are no raises to adjust for inflation. Many adjuncts teach at multiple universities at the same time and still struggle financially.
• For adjuncts, there is no job security. Your classes might not run any particular quarter and could be dropped altogether at any time. Professors without tenure are not guaranteed continued employment, either. While you could move up in rank, professors must be intimately involved in the school, which can lead to drama. Most universities hire predominantly adjuncts, and there is a large pool of interested parties for them to draw from. For professors, tenure is quite difficult to achieve, and that can rarely be done if teaching online.
• It takes a lot of time. Creating a class is time even more time consuming than teaching it, and you aren’t directly paid for that time. Each quarter, you need to adjust whatever class you’re teaching on the host platform. Then, when class is in session, you must respond to each assignment in detail. If you’re teaching a writing workshop, you need to read all the comments students make on their peers’ submissions as well. Even after it’s over, many students may ask you for recommendations for their applications to MFA programs, jobs, being judges, etc.
• While some schools respect their teachers’ private lives beautifully, others tend to snoop on teachers’ social media posts, etc. In any case, all your actions are expected to represent the school. So, if you tend to buck the system, reveal your ordinary life or a dubious past, party hardy, have mental issues, present yourself as a highly sexual being, have political ideas that don’t adhere to all the currently prevailing beliefs, then you might be in a precarious position.
• Students fill out evaluation forms. Reading them can be helpful in knowing what works and what you might want to change the next time you teach the course. You can experience gratification when they praise you. But you might dread reading them because once in a while, someone might say something negative that hurts. While students would serve themselves better by letting the teacher know during the class if something is a problem and thus get it addressed, sometimes they say nothing and only complain afterwards when it’s too late.
• This could be a plus or minus, but you should create a wide variety of courses within your specialty, which can be labor-intensive. This does give you the chance to delve into different topics, and prevent boredom of repetition, but if you don’t have time to create many courses at first, you won’t be able to teach often enough to support yourself.
• You are online every day while class is in session. Rather than working from 9–5, you get assignments turned in throughout the day. You must check online regularly, partly because you never know when a student is asking an important question.
• Some students have horrendous skills with the language, punctuation and grammar, and expect you to take extra time making each assignment perfect. They often also take advantage of your time by turning in extra assignments.
• Some students are not very good writers, take a long time to understand how to improve and might have developmental issues that prevent them understanding. You need to be sensitive to figuring that out and treating them appropriately, without hurting their feelings.
• Some students will inevitably get dejected if no one is responding excitedly to their bland stories. You’ll care about them and not want to see them sad, while you also don’t want to give them false hope or let their mistakes slide when they’re there to learn from you and their peers.
• As the professional, you know what stories need to improve, but if the other students in a workshop are beginners, they probably give all positive feedback to the other students at first. That provides a good balance and everyone needs to feel appreciated, but the contrast may make your comments look overly critical. This is not a big deal, but it’s something to keep in mind.
• You need to be able to interact in nuanced ways that prevent students from feeling criticized or ostracized. The wording on all your feedback requires strong people skills, and if you aren’t good at that, don’t apply.
• For a full-bodied interaction, you may feel you need to use Skype, phone calls, etc. to interact with individual students, and if you don’t like being on camera or have difficulty with a phone, obviously that would be prohibitive.
• If you don’t have a solid history of publications in highly esteemed real-world magazines and anthologies, or multiple well-reviewed books, you should consider this as a future option, but not apply yet.
• If you’re interested in teaching fiction writing, be aware that most universities teach Literary and very little Genre fiction. If you write Genre, you might only be able to find openings in non-university schools, and the number of students there tends to be much lower per class.
• You’re expected to keep adding to your publication credits. This can be healthy motivation, but it can be hard to find the time to write due to the low pay per course, which means you need to be creating multiple income streams and perhaps be trying out new options for money.
• If you don’t resonate with PC culture or simply don’t catch on to what gender a person presents as, you could be fired quickly for calling a student by the wrong pronoun.
• You could develop carpal tunnel syndrome, worsened eyesight, wrist arthritis, gain weight from being sedentary, and so on.

I personally adore teaching writing online year after year and deeply enjoy all the schools I’ve worked with. I have nothing but good memories and associations with teaching writing, though the financial aspect is very challenging and the physical pain it causes creates some limitations in the rest of my life. I still don’t regret a thing.

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