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What are some opportunities to teach online for IT professionals? – Becoming an IT / InfoSec / Technology Educator

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello there, and welcome back to the cyber coffee talk podcast. I’m Heather Monthie, your host for this podcast. So today’s episode is the second part of the series that I am doing on how to become an information security it technology educator. I spent many years in education answered a lot of questions over the years. So here I am answering them for you here on the podcast, my YouTube channel, my blog, etc. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about what are the online teaching opportunities for it and information security professionals enjoy. So what are some opportunities for it and information security professionals to teach online.

So in this video, I’m going to share with you a couple of different ways that if you’re interested in learning how you can become an online it instructor or professor, I’m gonna give you a couple different ways that you can start taking some steps today. So the first thing I always think that you should do, if you are interested in becoming an online instructor is really sit down and think about what it is that you really know how to do, and you know how to do well.

So you have to remember that if you’re going to go teach in an undergraduate program, you’re going to go teach in a vocational program, you’re teaching students who have never done some of these things before. So you need to know how to do it well and be able to answer a lot of different types of questions.

Sometimes as you progress up in your career, you start to forget some of those things that you used to have to do when you were you know, sort of a newbie in your profession. So if you are a software developer, and you’re leading your technical teams, and you’re you’re you’re, you’re doing a lot of project management, that kind of stuff, it might have been a while since you’ve done some very basic programming concepts.

So you want to sit down and really think about what it is that you can teach. And you can teach it really well right now if you could sit down and talk about it for an hour to two hours just off the top of your head. And the reason I say this is because oftentimes when people are new to teaching it, people are new to teaching, you know, data science professionals, etc, are new to teaching, you’re very smart, you’re very intelligent person and you want to come across as being smart, intelligent, you want to be able to answer all your students questions.

And so what ends up happening is, as I see people over preparing, they spend way too much time prepping for the course, for a one hour lecture or 45 minute lecture, they might spend five or six hours preparing for it for you know, an hour and a half class period, they’re spending you upwards of 10 hours preparing for it. And you shouldn’t have to do that, especially if it’s your first time teaching, it will burn you out.

So you want to make sure that you really just sit down think about what is it that I know that I can teach walking in day one, no problems, not a lot of prep time is going to be necessary. So think about that first, and then just be very clear, it is what the what you want to teach, you know, no one can teach everything. Sure you can, you know, there’s some people out there that can take a book, they can take a syllabus, and they can they can teach it but they’re not necessarily the expert in it. But um, you just understand that you’re not going to be able to teach absolutely everything. So really just focus in on what it is that you want to teach.

So you can start with colleges, universities, community colleges, things like that you can go on to websites, like higher ed jobs comm you can go to inside higher ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, those are probably the three major websites where you can go to look for teaching positions in universities, colleges, community colleges, they’re going to have both face to face opportunities there and online teaching opportunities there as well. And you can also go and look right at the school’s website that you are interested in going to teach for.

So if you you, you might want to get online and find out what are some top universities top colleges top community colleges that have you know, the teach the the skills that you want to teach if you’re a Linux, your Linux guru, and you want to be able to teach Linux look for the schools that are teaching Linux. Um, you also want to take into consideration any degree in certification requirements.

So if you are, you know, you’re a Linux guru, you know, Linux, like the back of your hand, the bottom line is, is that there are some education and credentialing requirements that are required to be able to teach in, in higher education. So if you don’t have a master’s degree, you’re it’s going to be difficult to find a position teaching at a bachelor’s, bachelor’s level. If you have a bachelor’s degree, you can look at the at the community college level, every school is going to be a little bit different in what it is that they’re looking for.

Some schools are also able to take certifications in account. So if you have a bachelor’s degree, and say a Linux plus certification, that that may qualify you to be able to teach, teach a Linux course maybe with another professor being sort of the you know, the professor of record, that kind of thing. So you want to take those those degree and certification requirements into consideration. Now, if you do not have and I’ll do a separate video on this, but if you do not have a degree, you do not have certifications. There are ways that you can teach you may not necessarily Be in a university or a college. But you can certainly create some of your own opportunities to teach. And I’ll do a whole separate video on that.

You also want to take a look at maybe k 12 schools. So k 12 schools, the there they have licensure requirements, whereas in higher ed, there’s degree requirements that you have to have these credentials to be able to teach certain courses in K 12, is very much driven by licensure. So students, teachers, students, people who are going to school to become a teacher, they have to go through specific training, they have to take tests, they have to do student teaching, things like that. A lot of states because there is a teacher shortage, there are some accelerated programs that you can get an emergency teacher licensed licensure, which means you teach while you’re working on your teacher licensure. So in high schools, it’s not necessarily it this is a gap, I think, that we see in education is that in higher education, and in industry, it’s all lumped under this umbrella called it sometimes. But in K 12. Schools, it’s usually lumped under this computer science term. So if you’re looking at K 12, schools look for look for computer science, teaching positions, they’re going to teach coding, there’s going to be some cybersecurity there, there’s going to be it in there, that kind of thing.

Some schools are calling it it, or networking, things like that, but generally, it kind of gets lumped under this sort of computer science term. So if you’re looking at K 12, you know, look for those computer science jobs, each state and in K 12. Each state governs their, their k 12 schools. So there’s not necessarily that that I’m aware of anyways, like a website that just lists all the all the open opportunities throughout the country, you have to look for it by state.

And then, if you are currently employed, as an IT professional and information security professional software developer, you’re working in a company, most companies have, you know, mentoring programs, that’s one thing that I did, as I was starting to get into teaching adults was mentoring new college grads, as they came out of out of out of the community college and they started working on our teams, I set up a mentoring program, help them get on boarded, help them get trained up on our systems, all that kind of stuff. So you can very easily get some good teaching experience. internally in your own company. It might not necessarily be online, but you might have an opportunity to develop some online training modules for for new people, or maybe, maybe to upskill, some people in your department or in another person’s department. So you’re, you’re an AI person, you you just eat breathe and live AI, and you want to be able to teach it to other developers in your, in your company, you can develop an online training program to help them learn more about AI,

then you can also create your own courses and content that you sell outside of an academic institution, it doesn’t necessarily need to be tied to a K 12 School, a vocational school, a college or university. There’s a lot of online marketplaces out there. Udemy is probably a big one. And as a tech professional, you’ve probably at least heard of it, you might have even purchased some courses off of there. Udemy is sort of a it’s an online marketplace where anybody can go out there, they can put out content, some good, some not so good. But that is a place where if you are really interested in teaching, you can put your content out there.

The other thing is that you can use learning management systems hosted learning management systems, or self hosted such as LearnDash as a self hosted learning management system that you can put on your own work WordPress website. There’s also hosted learning management systems, like Thinkific, teachable things like that, where you can essentially just create your own online online portal where students can come and they can take your courses that you’ve created, you market them, you sell them, you have full control over them, you retain all the revenue for them, there’s no limit on how much you can make.

Whereas at a university or a, you know, a community college, they’re going to pay you a set amount of money to teach a particular course, whereas if you take a course that you’ve developed on your own, you’ve developed it yourself, you know, and you’re running it online, the earnings can be limitless then with how you develop that. So there’s going to be a whole separate video on how to you know the steps that you need to take to create your own online content, your own online learning management system, that kind of thing.

And then you know, just build your own website. part that part of that goes with building your own learning management system and marketing your own courses is to have your own website have your own web presence. This can go for if you’re going to develop a course and sell it on your own, or it can go for if you are trying to get into a college into a university, you’re applying for jobs you want to be able to teach this is a good way for you to demonstrate your teaching abilities. So when you go in for an interview again another video when you go in for an interview at a college or university. It’s going to be Very helpful for you to have a portfolio of artifacts that show how you have helped students achieve a goal. So you’ve helped students, you know, transform in a certain way.

And ideally, it would be relevant to what it is that you want to teach. So by having your own website, it really, it puts you in control of what Google is saying about you. So that when you go in for job interviews, you have examples, you have artifacts, you have a portfolio that you can show the person that’s interviewing you that yes, you do know how to teach this topic, and you are good at it. And here’s why. So if you are interested in learning more about some of the tools that you can use to create your own courses, if you whether you want to use them and sell them on Udemy, or you want to create your own website and your own learning management system, you can download this over here, this tech teacher toolkit, where is it right here, this tech teacher toolkit. So if you go to bit.li slash tech teacher toolkit, I have put together a document that shares with you all the different tools that I’ve either I’m either using right now or I’ve used in the past as an online instructor on my technical instructor. And really just to you, as I’m building up my own learning management system in my own platform for teaching things, these are some of the tools that I’ve used. So I urge you to download it, check it out, and I’ll see you guys tomorrow in the next video.