Deciding to teach an online course can be equal parts exciting and unsure. Sure, you may know what to speak about, but how do you determine who you should be targeting, or where you should house your courses?
Fortunately, in this digital world, eLearning is an easily accessible, oftentimes price friendly alternative, and can be done from anywhere in the world. It’s no wonder why millions of people opt to learn digitally instead of in-person. But how do we design effectively to engage students and confront the challenges online classwork can present? Here are our tried and tested ways to make sure your course design stands out from the rest.
Determine your Audience
While basic, standard courses do have the capability of challenging and growing their learners, courses with more of a personal touch ultimately help them absorb the full amount of information and key points you’re wanting them to learn. Depending on the age group, learning style, and overall topic of your class, you’ll be able to determine which specific tools you’ll use and how they’ll resonate with your learner. Evaluating the needs of each course you design is closely tied to your audience and who is learning from what you teach.
Mix Up Your Media
In-person classes traditionally involve a presentation or powerpoint based on a chapter students should have read from their textbook (the key phrase being “should have read”). The principles taken from textbooks allow for the presentation to make more sense and for students to engage with the content through notes.
But how is this done in a digital space? Mixing up your media and using different tools is key! While having text on each slide is helpful for notes, it can get repetitive and fairly boring. Instead, consider using videos, audio, graphics, and text to effectively solidify your key takeaways for students. This tends to be much more effective than words on their screen.
Make it Digestible
Teaching online means there’s a little more effort into making your class structured and organized. Just like in a traditional syllabi, online spaces offer ways to develop a course and place it into learning modules. These transfer into a base module with goals, assessments, quizzes, and tests spaced out throughout the semester. While teaching online, it’s imperative to develop and display more targeted micro-goals for each module. This helps keep your learners on track, sets expectations, and is known as “course-mapping.”
Build Assessments Throughout the Learning Journey
In any class, assessing how far your students have come is vital. Building in assessments such as discussion posts, group work projects, quizzes, digital projects/portfolios/presentations, exams, and written or video assignments allow students to show you what they’re taking away from each class or module. These assessments shouldn’t be more than 10 percent of the coursework, though, so be mindful of how much work you’re giving your students. Also, everyone learns differently! Consider giving individuals two or three options for assessments to determine their learning speed and if they’re absorbing the course material.
Add Interaction
A huge advantage of in-person learning is the interaction between students and teacher, as having everyone learning together in a physical classroom is a helpful way to bounce ideas off each other. That being said, experiences in eLearning may be a little more difficult for some students who need that face to face interaction with peers. Consider having more open discussions and question/answer sessions after your class ends to see if a good conversation emerges.
Offer Support
Even though you won’t have physical in-person interactions, it’s still important to be there for your students. Offering set “help/support” times or live feeds will allow your students to contact you for questions about coursework, the syllabi, or any other support they may need. Take time to check in with your students once a week (if time allows) to see how they’re digesting the material or if they have any questions.
Be Flexible
While it may go without saying, we’ll say it anyway: be flexible with your students. There may be language barriers, time zone differences, and previous engagements (such as being a full time working parent). Staying flexible while you teach courses will not only put your students at ease, but it’ll allow you to take some of the pressure off yourself.
Using the above information, our hope is you’ll be more prepared to develop and execute an amazing course! If you’re dedicated to putting in the time, effort, and knowledge to create something worth working through, your students will recognize it. With SPEG, our priority is helping you get your expertise to your audience, and if we can help, we’d love the opportunity.
