This Ebook is a response to a demand for a far more detailed, comprehensive and systematic guide to effective online teaching. This book is a conglomerate of all the best practices and ideas that will guide you in making your online teaching interesting, timely and worthwhile.
Effective Online Teaching describes several online teaching and learning” (pun intended) techniques and tools that an instructor can use to improve their teaching practices. It starts with suggestions for creating an online class and goes on to provide practical advice on building effective student engagement, evaluation, and social media tools all aimed at improving the overall learning experience.
How To Be An Effective Online Teacher
The digital classroom brings with it a range of unknown and unexplored territory, mostly in part to its relative newness when compared to traditional teaching methods. To be an effective online teacher, there are 10 simple but effective practices you can follow. When coupled with a comprehensive course load and the right resources, there’s no reason why online learning can’t be even more effective than a traditional classroom setting.
1. Be Present
Sure, you might not be physically present in a classroom, but there are many ways to make yourself known in the digital realm. Achieving this online means utilizing a range of different communication methods and ensuring that you check in on them daily or hourly if needed. Discussion boards, emails, announcements, and forums, are just some of the ways you can be present each day in your online classroom. When the course begins, set clear guidelines for your students about when you’ll be present.
2. Set The Expectations
As the online classroom can often feel a little free-form, you’ll need to provide students with a very clear set of expectations before they commence their studies. These expectations should include everything from what they can expect from you as their teacher, as well as what will be required of them. The expectations can outline due dates for assessments, your communication frequency, how much online participation you require of them, and the conduct they will be expected to display throughout the course.
3. Let The Students Do The Work
The aim of learning is to have students engaged in the content for as long as possible, so you need to create the opportunity for this to happen. Professor of Psychology Bill Pelz discussed in his “Principles of Effective Online Pedagogy” report that the more time the students spend engaged in the content, the more they’ll learn.
To give your students plenty of opportunity to engage with the content and each other you can ask them to find and discuss resources, grade their own assignments, and hold student-led discussions in the online forums.
4. Nurture A Supportive Online Community
Since this online space is their classroom, you want students to feel as supported as possible when they’re here. By using a variety of dialogue formats, you’ll ensure your coursework caters to all learning types and allows students to flourish.
Encourage students to use the general forum for discussion, but also set up small groups within the class so that students can engage in feedback and support with their fellow classmates. Some students may sit back and learn from the sidelines, whereas others will benefit greatly from actively engaging in this type of communication.
5. Think Before You Write
Not only is this an important principle for teaching staff to follow, but one that should be communicated from the very beginning to all students. As it’s well known that written text can be left open to interpretation or misinterpretation at any time, it’s crucial to craft well thought out responses and posts to others.
When crafting responses to assignments and other evaluations, the best tone to use is a simple, clear, and polite one. As these responses are all your students have to go off in regards to feedback, you need to leave nothing open for interpretation.
6. Promote reflection and communication through quality asynchronous discussion
- Return to posted topics that have not been fully discussed and promote contribution and reflection.
- Monitor participation and contact students individually if they are either not participating, or are taking over conversations and not permitting contributions from other individuals.
7. Have a good balance of active leader and active observer
You will begin the course as the manager of the learning community. As the course progresses, slowly transfer the responsibility to the community of learners. The online community building steps in point 4 will help with this. You should also gradually retract further out of communal discussions.
8. Request regular feedback and be mindful of misinterpretation
- Check in with your students to see how things are going. You can do formal or informal surveys to assess attitudes, workload and challenges. Make course correction as necessary — we’re all learning.
- Use ad hoc quizzes to assess learner comprehension of material.
9. Regularly check content resources and applications
- Regularly check all links, resources, modules, and activities. Online content can move or change, which can lead to disengagement.
- Assist students who are having difficulty navigating course links or managing the material spanning across various web pages.
- Model the process of navigating to websites that are not embedded in the course, and demonstrate how to appropriately manage keeping track of navigation when jumping from site to site.
10. Seek and Use Feedback
Course evaluations are standard fare and can be quite useful in evaluating what’s working well and what’s not, especially if you’re new to online teaching. But such feedback will inform future courses you teach, not the current one.
A course Q&A forum allows students to ask questions about the course structure, assignments, and grades along the way and enables classmates to chime in. It’s a real-time assessment of how things are going.
Conclusion
Effective Online Teaching PDF – This 45-page book may be one of the best available guides for teachers thinking about adapting to this new technology. It covers the reasons to teach online, how to prepare, planning for online instruction, student-centered learning, managing Internet behavior in class, developing course outlines appropriate for an online classroom, and instructor evaluation.