There are ways to supplement or even replace traditional face-to-face education with online learning. The sheer amount of information available for online learning is overwhelming, however, so choosing the right resource for your needs can be a challenge. Below are five tools I’ve found particularly useful for my own online learning endeavors.
Whether or not you want to believe it, social media and digital technology is changing the way we learn and communicate. While some people lament this change, we see an opportunity to empower educators — and their students — with better tools to engage in online learning.
Professional development is essential to the continual growth of any educator. With all that’s going on in our lives, striving for continuous growth can sometimes be challenging. If you’re currently using an online tool to teach, there’s a very good chance that you’ve considered the possibility of switching to a different platform and/or program for your next school year. It’s perfectly natural to ponder this because we’re constantly looking for new and up-to-date resources – especially those that might improve student achievement.
Have you ever wondered which online teaching tools were best for teachers? The great thing is that we have plenty of choice. How many times have we left a site and thought: “I wish I’d searched for XYZ before joining them?”. We all do it. But how do you know which online teaching tools are the best for education purposes?
Are you looking for teaching tools for your next lesson? If you have a knack for teaching, you may have already discovered the advantages technology offers. Today’s education is focused on classroom innovation, including the incorporation of technology into lesson plans. Here are the best online teaching tools for teachers you need to know about.
Online teaching is something that one must be able to assess with extreme efficiency. Online teaching ensures better learning experience, anytime and anywhere. A lot of tools are available for online teaching, however, the best tools for online teaching 2022 are mentioned below:
If you’re thinking about becoming an online instructor, it’s possible that you’re already imagining what tools can help you best communicate with your students. Presentation software alone probably doesn’t top the list, but it should! You could publish a course using nothing but your voice and a whiteboard. However, if you use PowerPoint or any other presentation software, you will find that communicating with your students is much easier.
Our passion for education refuses to be cornered within the four walls of a classroom. The virtual world offers us unparalleled access, affordability, convenience, and flexibility when it comes to educating yourself or others. Here’s a brief review of the best online teaching tools that will revolutionize your learning journey in 2019!
Advantages of online teaching platforms
- Using online platforms, Subject mattter experts can choose from hundreds of teaching methods using digital tools—for example, interactive videos, quizzes, etc.
- It eliminates geographical handicaps as both teachers and students can do their jobs as long as they have an internet connection.
- As there are a lot more teaching methods available online, teachers can customize classes for individual students or a group with similar preferences.
- In the long term, platforms are more economical as you will only be paying for the platforms and nothing else. There is no need to upgrade multiple software and expensive hardware components.
- Tracking becomes easier on a platform because all activities of students and teachers become trackable and reportable.
Best online teaching platforms for teachers
Here are the popular online teaching platforms you can consider for hosting your courses-
Learnyst
Over the years, Learnyst has empowered thousands of online educators and academies to provide seamless learning experiences for their students. This is one of the most feature-rich and comprehensive platform that offers tutors create their courses from the ground up. To breathe some fresh air into even the most boring of concepts, tutors can upload course content, use rich content formats like quizzes and interactive videos.
Once the course creation is done,Course creators can upload them on a website that is custom-built for you. The website is SEO-optimized so that it is easy for your target audience to find you using search engines. A mobile app is also available.
Tutors who have used Learnyst have combinedly earned over INR 350 crores in revenue, and the platform has over 3 Million students using it.
Learnyst also has a free trial period of 14-days where users can sign up and explore the platform.
Create Your Branded Teaching Website
Udemy
The platform has a single purpose of disrupting the education ecosystem by allowing anyone to learn from its pool of thousands of experts. The platform features several contents creating tools to create the likes of PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, audio, video. Instructors can use it for a fee. And also course creators can award their students with a certificate of completion for the course that they underwent. However, Udemy charges 50% on each sale of a course. Currently, the platform has around 12 million students.
Creating courses on Udemy is very straightforward, and you should be able to get the hang of it once your start. You can also refer to this guide on How to Create an Udemy Course.
Teachable
This is a tool that was built to overcome some of the major disadvantages of Udemy. Udemy provides very little autonomy to instructors, they can’t even control branding and pricing of courses, and they get very limited information about people who buy their course. Teachable overcomes all these.
Three million students use the platform now and have over 20,000 courses and 7500 instructors. The numbers are only increasing. You can start creating a course with the basic plan that costs
$29 per month. Among other things, you can use the tool to create and edit engaging multimedia lectures, videos, and coaching sessions.
WizIQ
This is another well-known online tutoring website. This platform has been a favorite choice among teachers for live and on-demand webinars. It has features including slides, screen sharing, video, and audio. WizIQ is particularly popular among academic course content creators.
The platform is very easy to create courses and then publish on its marketplace. To make tests and assessments more engaging, WizIQ offers nine templates to choose from. You can also keep track of the performance of your teachers using comprehensive analytics and reporting tools. To enable learning on the go, they offer WizIQ as mobile apps. Plans start at $25 per month.
Udemy
This is a massive online teaching platform with over 2 million students worldwide and 13,000 courses. It lets instructors design robust classes including video lectures, PowerPoint files, screencast videos, documents, audio files, text, and mashup videos. The platform is completely free for instructors to create their courses which they may offer either for free or for a fee. If there is a fee involved, Udemy takes a percentage of that. This is a very professional-looking platform that has a lot to offer.
RCampus
One of several online learning platforms, RCampus can be used to create courses, student assignments, keep grades, hold class discussions, and post many types of educational content such as videos, links, images, etc. It can also be used as an ePortfolio management system in which both students and faculty can “build multiple, fully-functional presentation portfolios for demonstrating their skills and knowledge or for career development”.
Learnopia
This free online learning platform enables instructors to design and offer courses consisting of a combination of videos, audio files, PowerPoint presentations, and documents such as PDF files, as well as tests consisting of multiple choice questions. Instructors can choose to make their courses freely available or charge a fee for them. Learnopia takes a percentage of all for-fee courses.
Peer 2 Peer University
P2PU is a grassroots open education project that offers free university-level courses. It is run by volunteers. Instructors can create courses and offer curriculum in the form of slideshows, videos, documents, and discussion boards. Enrollment in courses is limited to provide the best experience for the learner, making it one of the best online learning platforms.
Teachers Pay Teachers
Rather than a place to teach students, this is a website where instructors can either sell or share freely their teaching materials. Teachers may post videos, learning kits, lesson plans, study guides, clip art, and much more that they can choose to give away or charge for. If there is a charge involved, teachers earn royalties on the money earned.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a mostly free online teaching platform that allows you to create and distribute online learning materials. Designed with a variety of different industries and needs in mind, the platform works on a freemium model, with the basic free subscription including the vast majority of the tools you need to offer and distribute online lessons. With support for online sales of lessons, student assessments and more, the Thinkific platform offers a robust set of features for students and teachers alike.
How to Get Started Teaching Online
Set Goals
The first thing you’ll want to think about is what you’re trying to achieve with this online course. Consider whether the entirety of the course will be on online teaching platforms, if it meant as a supplement to a course, or is meant as a prerequisite before joining a future course, e.g. an online course on basic math skills which might be required before taking an advanced live class, etc.
Create a Course Plan
Just like a face-to-face course, courses on online learning platforms need to have outlines or course plans for what you’ll cover each week. If these are courses that you’ve previously offered live, you’re one step ahead of the game. Your course plans will be your maps for what kinds of materials you will need to create for your lessons.
Gather Your Equipment
After you’ve considered what lessons you want to teach and what online learning platform you want to use, think about what types of equipment, software, and other tools you have at your disposal. Do you have a video camera or other device capable of capturing HD video? Do you have a screencasting software program? If not, sign up for a free trial of Camtasia Studio, or check out screencasting programs such as Screencast-O-Matic or Jing. Will you need to create PowerPoints? Do you have a microphone to capture audio? Once you figure out what your technological capabilities and limitations are, you’ll know what kinds of content you’ll want to create.
Set Aside Time for Creation and Editing
If you’re going to create videos and screencasts for your lessons, consider not only the time it takes to record these, but also how long it takes to edit them, create title slides, render and upload them to online teaching platforms, etc
Conclusion
Teaching online is a great way to earn some extra cash. Teaching online is also a good way to become known in your field and earn more clients or create your own product. There are lots of businesses out their that will pay you to teach them how to do it for free. But which platform is the best?