Teaching Online Courses Is A Skill Every Knowledge Commerce Marketer Must Master. The Way You Teach Can Get You More Students Than You Ever Thought
Knowledge Commerce is a booming new line of ecommerce. You first discover, and then “productize” your own unique knowledge, talent, skills or passions – into ebooks, courses, memberships, webinars, virtual summits, consulting packages, and a host of other formats.
It’s an ideal business for solopreneurs. If you want to grow yourself into an exclusive and premium brand, and command market-dominating prices, this is your perfect opportunity. So get in early.
Teaching any physical class is hard enough. Being able to captivate the audiences in front of you is easier said than done. But it’s all a lot harder when you’re teaching online courses to an audience whose faces you can’t even see.
How do you know if you’re getting your students attention and keeping it? How do you know if they are loving your teaching style or hating it? How do tell from their body language whether they are comfortable with you and actually enjoying the lectures?
Online course-teaching skills are special. If you look to engage and educate your students by gauging their moods first, you’ll have no reference point. Instead, you have to first consciously lead them into a mood where they may want to listen. You have to take the initiative to get them started into absorbing and thinking.
At Solohacks Academy, we believe that great teachers of online courses are those who learn to direct their hidden audiences towards rapt attention, instead of relying on students state-of-mind to cue them into the right teaching wavelength.
Contents
- The smartest way to break the ice – begin with a bit of storytelling
- Connect with your online students – use some clever psychological insights
- Show signs of confidence, authority and expertise with your body language
- Use your voice modulation powerfully to convince your learners
- Introduce these tricks whenever learner fatigue seems to set in
- Control the pace of your lessons, set topic boundaries, and distribute time
- Create and handle the most likely student questions to answer with examples
- Soar on your strengths as a presenter – every teacher has an impacting style
- Reduce distractions that may affect the eyes and the ears of students
- Always end a class with a map of “where we are now and where to go next”
1. The smartest way to break the ice – begin with a bit of storytelling
With online teaching, the last thing you should aim to do is to begin with self-consciousness in your own teaching. Many online instructors begin with these three fatal ploys:
- They try to hum and haw a bit as if to sound casual and be one with the audiences. They may fiddle with the collars of their T-shirts, and say things like, “Here we are folks, I am Robert Smith your teacher for this course on “Aquiring New Job Skills”, and I think I am wearing unmatched socks.” They expect to make the audience laugh or feel light, or feel a connection with the teacher. Are they connecting? Who knows? They sound like they’re trying too hard to be “one of the boys”.
- Alternatively, they try to wear a stiff upper lip, look all professor-like in a suit, and begin with a to-the-point briskness like this: “Welcome to the introductory lecture in the course on “How To Quickly Learn the Skills You Need For A New Job” I’m Jason Burtwell, PhD, recently retired as the HR Director of ABC company.” Are they connecting? Who knows, again? Sounds like they’re deliberately trying to maintain their dignity and distance because a teacher has to be seen as an authority by the students, not as one of them.
- The third wrong way – they start by telling their own life struggles. Wearing a faraway look in their eyes, they look to be waiting to offload their own past travails, saying things like, “Welcome class. You have to hear my story of how I got to creating this course on “How To Get Reskilled For the New Kinds Of Jobs”. I got eased out of my job at XYZ company, and then drew a blank with my resume at 164 companies, not realizing why I was failing, failing, failing.” Are they connecting? I would guess not! Do people want to hear your sob story, as the first lesson when they have eagerly and enthusiastically signed up for a course?
Storytelling is indeed a great ice breaker for any online class, but it has to be the right story
Like all good things in marketing, storytelling is one of those tools that can work spectacularly if used well – and it can nosedive noiselessly like a wet bomb if it’s wrongly done. There is scientific evidence that if done right, it can change the neuro-wiring of customers. So, learn how to do it correctly, and for all the right reasons.
At the beginning of every class or lesson or module of your course, take up a pertinent case study or two (not your own, preferably) that demonstrates the value of the concept you are going to teach in that lesson. Let people feel the challenges of a situation first, so that when you begin to expound on the lesson that follows the case study, the import of what you are saying translates into something of clear practical value.
Storytelling isn’t just an appealing way to break the ice and start teaching a course. It has its logic grounded in scientific research too. Scientists have found that when people listen to a story, certain parts of their brains light up, showing they are engaged. There are two particular areas of the brain that get activated when listening to stories. They are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. In contrast, traditional staid content does not enliven such brain activity.
The result of such brain awakening means the following things happen:
- The listener’s brain patterns align with and start mirroring those of the speaker.
- There is a 5X increase in the neural activity of the listener’s brain when listening to a story.
- There is neural coupling, which means the listener’s brain revives the listener’s own similar life experiences.
- Storytelling lights up the sensory cortex in the brain, allowing the listener to feel, hear, taste, or even smell the story.
- Dopamine (also known as the pleasure drug) gets secreted in the listener’s brain, enabling retention of the emotions of the story.
- Stories are found to be 22 times more memorable than mere facts and figures alone.
2. Connect with your online students – use some clever psychological insights
There are three ways to connect with your students quite instantly. These three ways almost always work if they are used together.
Pain-point identification as the first connector
The fastest way to connect with your online students is to identify all their possible pain-points and their reasons for taking your course. Nearly everybody who signs up for a course is looking to solve a problem.
Some people state their problems as pains, some other state their needs as goals to achieve. Even when they state their objectives or goals, overcoming of bottlenecks to achievement is the pain they would like solved.
When you are able to identify what could be the biggest goals or pain-points of your students you instantly create a bond of empathy.
You can take this empathy further by talking of the “what and why” of their pain-points. When people are helped in the identification of their pains and told why those pains may occur, they feel that you may have a solution to hand. They are primed and ready to hear the rest of what you have to say.
Maintaining steady eye contact as the second connector
If there is just one easy way to notch up your impact as an online teacher, to persuade students to see your point of view, it’s steady and kindly eye contact with your audience. In the case of online courses, you would aim to make eye-contact with the lens of your camera so your every student feels like you are looking directly at him or her.
Positive eye contact helps you in two other ways. It helps you build rapport with your audience because it conveys your message on a personal level. It also keeps them engaged with you by giving them a sense of your involvement in their problems.
It’s possible that you may using a script on a scrolling laptop or tablet screen as a teleprompter to help you read what you are saying in a natural-speaking sort of way. In such cases, place the scrolling screen as close to the camera lens as possible – after a few trials you can find a position to read off the screen while appearing to look directly into the camera lens.
Encouraging people to take handwritten notes as the third connector
Every now and again, as you lecture your students, it’s a great idea to say something like this: “Now, note that point down by hand, it’s important.” Encouraging note-taking, especially by written longhand, has deep psychological benefits that reading from transcripts of lectures can never provide. Longhand note-taking, psychologists believe, kindles certain parts of the brain that aid retention and memory, distills the insights as applicable to each person’s own life, and creates a physically recorded form of acute listening. Long after your speech is over, the notes taken are a reminder of not just what you said but even how you said it.
Your lecture, your personality, and your connection with the student gets encoded by the student using his own way of understanding and registering what you said.
3. Show signs of confidence, authority and expertise with your body language
According to the Harvard Business Review, the body language of a teacher is particularly important for online course teaching. This is what they say: “Research shows that people form impressions about a teacher’s competence in as little as half a minute. This means, within seconds, listeners will decide whether you are trustworthy, and they will do it based on your body language and vocal attributes. What you say and how you say it are equally important.”
Three factors about body language are important to keep in mind:
See that you maintain an open posture
An open posture is one that signals that there is no barrier between you, the presenter, and your audience. Be conscious of the way you use your arms.
For example, someone who is a bit self-conscious, or underconfident, may cross their arms defensively across their body, or twiddle their fingers. On the other hand, someone who is confident may have steady hands and fingers that are open, and have the palms turned up.
Gesture optimally with your hands
You should be loose enough to use your hands to gesture at the whiteboard behind you – or maybe, emphasize a point with a firming up of your fists. Gesturing with your hands suggests a certain freedom in your speech pattern, a lack of stiffness.
But beware of over-gesturing, because too much movement of the hands is not only distracting on-screen, but suggestive of a bit of nervousness. Use hand gestures for emphasis, but not otherwise.
Cut out all those meaningless words like “um”, “er”, “like” or “you know”
One of the most disliked words that listeners hate is the word “like” – used often and as a filler by speakers on screen.
When you are writing a piece of text for a blog post, you can use commas or full stops to give a bit of space between thoughts. When you are speaking though, it’s common to feel a little uncomfortable to allow little spaces of silence between thoughts.
Most speakers feel compelled to fill up those little empty spaces needed to form their next thoughts. That’s why words like “um”, “er”, “like” and “you know” creep into speaking.
Getting rid of a habit like this is tough – and you have to keep watching your own videos keenly to see when you use such filler words and why. And then you have to consciously change your habits. You will notice that great speakers usually learn to use pauses of silence powerfully. They turn the dreaded “filler words” habit around and actually use bits of “eloquent silence” as a speaking weapon.
4. Use your voice modulation powerfully to convince your learners
How should you best use your voice when teaching online courses? There is a well-known way among theatre artists. It posits that your normal speaking voice should adopt three extra tiers, as follows:
The Bold Tier is the additional voice you’d use when you want to emphasize a point strongly
Think of a piece of text you’d write. Would you be tempted to change a sentence to bold font just to make it stand out as something you want to strongly point out? It’s the same with speaking as with writing.
Let’s take an example. Let’s say these are two of the sentences you have to speak: “Learning new technology is not just a necessity. It’s actually imperative for competitive advantage.” Here, you would speak the first sentence in your normal tone, and the second sentence in a stronger and more emphasizing tone (your Bold Tier voice). When written, the text would be like this: “Learning new technology is not just a necessity. It’s actually imperative for competitive advantage.“
See how you speak “normally” and how best you can change your voice to create additional strength in certain sentences that needs extra emphasis. You don’t have to speak louder, but there has to be a modulation in tone and voice delivery that makes the sentence feel like it’s spoken in “bold font”.
The Cautioning Tier is the additional voice you’d use when you want to caution somebody
Again, think of a piece of text you’d write. Would you be tempted to change a sentence to italics font just to make it distinctive as something you want to caution somebody about – like an afterthought or P.S.? See how best you can change your voice to create a feel of “be careful”.
Let’s take an example, again. Let’s say these are two of the sentences you have to speak: “How you choose between options for logo designs is up to you. But remember, that the choice you make cannot be changed in a hurry down the line.” Here, you would speak the first sentence in your normal tone, and the second sentence in a cautionary tone (your Cautioning Tier voice). When written, the text would be like this: “How you choose between options for logo designs is up to you. But remember, that the choice you make cannot be changed in a hurry down the line.“
There has to be a modulation in tone and voice delivery here that makes the sentence feel like it’s spoken in “italicized font”. Experts often tone down their voices to make afterthoughts sound more powerful by a slight lowering of voice.
The Aside Tier is the additional voice you’d use when you want to indicate anything “besides the point”
Again, just think of a piece of text you’d write. Would you be tempted to change put a part of your text in brackets just to make it look like an “aside” thought, incidental to the main thought? See how best you can change your voice to create a feel of “by the way”.
Let’s take an example, yet again. Let’s say these are two of the sentences you have to speak: “Despite contrary research, several people believe extroverts are better at marketing than introverts. Some beliefs are hard to overturn even by research.” Here, you would speak the first sentence in your normal tone, and the second sentence in an “aside” tone with a bit of a chuckle (your Aside Tier voice). When written, the text would be like this: “Despite contrary research, several people believe extroverts are better at marketing than introverts. (Some beliefs are hard to overturn even by research.)”
There must be a modulation in tone and voice delivery here that makes the sentence feel like it’s spoken to point out “contrariness”. Experts often add a bit of a light laugh to their voices to make such sentences sound like “strange but true” thoughts.
As with most things, voice-usage to create certain effects on the listener takes a lot of experimentation and practise. No two speakers would say things the same way. See how your own voice can work for you in different situations for different types of emphasis.
5. Introduce these tricks whenever learner fatigue seems to set in
It’s but natural that an online teacher may never be able to guess when learner fatigue sets in, and when students’ attention spans are flaking. But there are some simple ways to ensure that you incorporate into your classes some benchmarks for attention, and some attention-retriever ideas. Follow these three ideas for starters:
Let your students know what good participation looks like
It is up to you to clearly set certain minimum expectations of attentive participation for students. Is merely logging in to the video class enough to count as participation? Is scrolling to the end of the video equal to participation? What is participation in your terms as a teacher? Tell the students what you expect in the form of attention.
One way is to introduce quizzes in the middle of classes that check comprehension so far. Unless the quiz is completed and the correct answer checked up and read, the course video will not go further. Many course-delivery tools allow for mid-class mandatory quizzes to proceed with the lesson. So use the technology, if it’s available in your course creation tool or plugin.
The “secret words that strings a sentence” idea
A very clever idea I once came across, in a course I signed up for, was this one. The course-author said that through his ten-minute lesson he would suddenly name some nine words and not tell us when those nine secret words would be uttered. We had to listen to the lecture fully to get to the ninth word.
When we then got the nine words, we had to order those words into a cogent sentence. That sentence would be the summary of the whole lesson. Only if we input the correct sentence into a box, and got it right, could we proceed to the next lesson. (For those who are very curious, the sentence finally was: “Great writing grows from great thoughts, not great words.”)
Needless to say the game-like quality of this idea was novel. But it also achieved its aim to keep attention rapt until the very end of the class. And then, distilling what we learned into that one short pithy sentence gave a sense of achievement and completion of understanding. What a great idea!
Getting students to leave behind the top three points of what they remember from the class
One other terrific way to get and keep student attention in an online class, is to require students to leave behind three top points that they remember from their online course module. This is required when a lesson ends. There are no right and wrong answers, so everyone is free to say what struck them as the top three points in the lesson.
After they’ve filled this column out, they will have access to see what others who took the course before them named as their top points. Their three points would similarly be added to the responses list, for the benefit of those taking the course after them.
The very idea that someone else is going to see how attentive you were and how sharply you grasped the lesson and articulated your key takeaways is always an incentive to show how well you learned the lesson. Needing to be attentive thus also becomes competitive.
6. Control the pace of your lessons, set topic boundaries, and distribute time
I once had a teacher in school who was the classic example of how not to pace a lesson. She would ramble on and on, deeply elaborating on the first five points of the lesson she wanted to cover. Then finding that she had only ten minutes of class time left, she would suddenly rush through to the end of the lesson like she was running after a train leaving the station. What’s worse, as she expounded on the very last topic of the lesson, we would see her gathering her bag and papers and walking out of class as she talked. The end of her very last sentence would ring out to us from the end of the corridor where she had already reached.
There are three simple things you can do to see that every lesson you teach doesn’t end like that:
Divide your time equally between all the sections you must adequately cover
This is just a question of simple math – if you have a total time allocated for the lesson of 12 minutes, and you have five topics to cover aside from an intro and an outro, give each topic section two minutes. That should add up to ten minutes spent on the meat of the lesson. It also leaves another two minutes of available time – use a 1-minute intro and a 1-minute summary.
The important thing is to give what’s more important more time, and what’s less important less time. This takes a bit of lesson planning. The thing that always disturbs the time scheduling and pacing is the belief that you can “wing it” somehow within the given time.
Set clear topic boundaries so you don’t exceed them
Knowledge has a way of branching out endlessly in many directions. When you are teaching an online class, and your head is full of knowledge on a subject, you could easily add more depth and breadth to a topic as you go along, not realizing that you are over-extending your topic boundaries, and confusing students with too much extraneous information
It’s a good idea to begin a new topic in a lesson module with, “Here are the three points we’ve going to cover on this topic …” and then stick to those three points. Reist the temptation to meander away and waste time and then pull yourself up and say to the class, “Well, that was “by the way”, it’s not what you really need to remember …”
Say more with less words
As the wise ones say, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Any image – a photo, a chart, a diagram, a visualization, a graph, a cartoon – can say much more than you can ever try to explain with words. Visuals are also easier to comprehend because they simplify complex ideas. For example, if you were explaining the flow of a process, it is so much easier to understand when you see a flow-chart than if the flow was verbally explained. So use visuals a lot in your teaching – because pictures stick in the memory better, and let you offer a lot less of convoluted explanations.
7. Create and handle the most likely student questions to answer with examples
At the end of each lesson, you could add one feature that is immensely useful to students, but which very few courses offer. It is a lesson-based FAQ database. Most courses offer FAQs on how to sign up for the courses, or how to get through classes, or how to request refunds. They never offer FAQs for lessons themselves.
But there are immense benefits to introducing lesson-based FAQs:
Students can check if their doubts are already cleared in answer to someone else’s query
If you were to start with a database of queries that you anticipate students may ask at the end of each lesson, you can keep adding to it as you allow students to ask their own questions not available in your database. Over time, more and more queries would get answered via the growing FAQ list – and the course will become more of a passive earner needing less of your personal time answering queries of students.
FAQs often cover topics that may not have been adequately covered in a lesson, so they’re insights for you
If you find that new queries are being added to the database pertaining to one or two topics especially, it would give you insights on how to tweak your classes to include these most asked doubts. You may need to check why your lesson is falling short of answers for students in the area where they are asking the maximum questions and adding to your FAQ database.
You’ll get insights into trends of interest among students to aid your future courses
In one course created by my client, on “Artificial Intelligence” there were repeated queries that fell outside the course, but seemed to point to a growing trend of interest. Students were asking what skills would they need to ensure they could not be losing incomes because of Artificial Intelligence creeping into our lives and making humans redundant. While the lesson was focused on how AI was adding more to our lives, student queries were more about how AI might take away more from their lives. The course-author thus found another topic to make a course on – and called it “How Not To Let AI Reduce Your Wealth And Life”.
8. Soar on your strengths as a presenter – every teacher has an impacting style
According to Jason Teteak, who runs a course on Udemy titled “Teacher Training: Teach the Perfect Lecture Students Love!”, there are four types of teacher personalities. See if you naturally fit into one of these four classifications.
The critical idea here is that you should “soar on your strengths” and not aim to be all these four types of teachers. You have your forte, and it’s all yours to make the most of. People will fall in love with your style and what it does for them. Every kind of teaching style has its own way of revving up students. Don’t ever try to be the kind of teacher another competitor is. Be your authentic self for maximum impact.
The Fascinator is the teacher whose style is to impart lots of wisdom
Some of us love teachers who spout a lot of wisdom. They invoke in us, as learners, feelings of awe, as we listen to the sheer breadth and depth of what they know. We particularly love the way they teach concepts and then analyze these to help us mine “insights”. In the end, they make us feel like we have got a lot for the value we paid. They make us feel full and satisfied.
If you are such a teacher who can enthrall students with wisdom, labyrinths of knowledge, and the ability to distill insights from all that knowledge, then let “fascination” be the leitmotif of your teaching style.
The Inspirer is the teacher whose style is to impart lots of spirit
Some teachers don’t merely teach what they know. They use that to show us visions of how their teaching can transform our lives, our particular situations. They inspire us to reach higher, and show us what is at the end of the rainbow if we should follow their advice. They show us glimpses of the results to be aiming for. In short, the lesson is a ladder rung up to success. as the teacher helps us define success.
If you are such a teacher who can galvanize students by showing them visions, goals, and focused actions driven by result-orientedness, then let “inspiration” be the leitmotif of your teaching style.
The Energizer is the teacher whose style is to impart lots of courage
There are many teachers who can teach theory and even implementation of theory – but they fail to be able to bolster our courage to take risks to try. We end up taking a spate of courses, learning more and more, but doing less and less, as we get daunted by the sheer bulk of activities we have to experiment with to get things right. Students need the courage to do things, as much as the knowledge of what to do. Some teachers, though, have the happy knack of making us want to move energy towards our goals. They can embolden us to stretch our boundaries and take calculated risks to succeed.
If you are such a teacher who can drive and motivate students by empowering them to practice and experiment and innovate with what you teach, then let “energizing” be the leitmotif of your teaching style.
The Performer is the teacher whose style is to impart lots of entertainment
Some teachers make their classes so entertaining and engaging that we hardly notice time passing by. When the class comes to an end, there is often a silent sigh of satisfaction escaping us, and also a kind of incompleteness. We want more of what we got. The class or lesson was a memorable high-point for us, that we feel we cannot forget in a hurry. It’s not that the teacher entertained us with jokes and pokes, but the case studies chosen were highly interesting and intriguing, and the teacher made the mundane topic sound exciting by showing how dramatic results can grow out of seemingly worthless ideas.
If you are such a teacher who can entertain students by showing them how innovation and creativity works, and you can do this with a bit of dramatic flair, then let “performing” be the leitmotif of your teaching style.
9. Reduce distractions that may affect the eyes and the ears of students
Great teaching skills can be nullified if your own carelessness allows distractions to draw away the eyes and ears of your students. Research from Microsoft showed all of us that we are increasingly holding less attention span than goldfish. As teachers of online courses, we can not allow our own negligence of fine details to let human students fall far below the attention-thresholds of some dumbest sea-life!/p>
So what are the key distraction we may let into our online lessons, that we should beware of?
New topic begins but old background text remains
The classic mistake that hurts the student’s eye is when, as a teacher, you have shifted to a new topic of the lesson … but the whiteboard or bullet points behind you are still on what you last were talking about. This is unforgivable, especially in an online class, because the small screen makes the eye wander over every little detail on it. Move the screen background to keep pace with your lecture. It’s better to have nothing behind you than to have something that’s discordant with what you are currently focusing on in your speech.
The smallest noises are, in fact, the most distracting
Most of us, as teachers online, would be very careful not to let our homely noises enter the videos we create – like clanging cutlery or crockery from our kitchens, or a dog barking from the lawn outside the window, or a child screaming in a nearby room. But the loud noises are not half as distracting, says the research, as the small almost inaudible noises from far away.
For example, if there were an ambulance with sirens in the far distance from your home, barely audible in the background of your video, you can be sure all ears will be tuned towards that to hear it better. What is low is what gets our eyes and ears more curious to get the full sight or sound. So, go through your videos to edit out all big and small sounds.
The teacher’s inadvertent mannerisms can irk students
Sometimes teachers have a way of licking their dry lips as they speak, or biting their lower lips as they think, or even touching their hair too frequently. Of all these mannerisms, though, scratching the head really feels horrible to watch on screen. Mannerisms often escape notice in real life, but when your students are fully focused on a small screen and looking only at you, your repetitive movements or unintended affectations can irk students.
You need an observant eye to see that you are prone to doing some actions without thinking. If needed, get a friend to tell you what quirks of action they can spot as too repetitive in your lesson delivery. Once caught out, don’t be worried about it, or think it’s a great problem you can’t conquer. Often awareness is all it takes to make you more conscious of an unconscious habit and cure it.
10. Always end a class with a map of “where we are now and where to go next”
Good teaching skills always include lesson endings that have some continuity factor to them. This follows the great understanding that knowledge is never complete, there’s always something more to learn, more mountains to climb. To bring a sense of continuity to your lesson modules, think of ways to make students ready for what is likely to come next. This allows them to get mentally ready to receive more instruction when they know what they can expect. Here are some ways to do this:
Show them a map of what’s completed and what comes next in the lessons flow
In your course, always make sure that you have a map of the lessons you are teaching, so that students can be shown this at the end of each lesson. It can show them what’s already been covered, where they are in the learning process, and how much further there is to go.
Show them a glimpse of what territories of knowledge they will have to cover in the next lesson. Not only does this give students a sense of satisfaction of how many bridges they have already crossed, but it allows them to get mentally attuned – to shift gears, if you will – to what is coming next.
Give students some “prep-material” to read up before the next class
It’s also a great idea to show students what to expect to learn in the very next lesson and to give them some “prep work” to do before that. For instance, let’s say, you are teaching a course on the “latest SEO techniques that content marketers can use” … and students need to be readied for the next lesson which is keyword research. You are planning to teach them some new ways to keyword research.
In that case, how about asking them to do some keyword research as they already know it, for some particular keywords, before the next lesson. They may use different methods to do this, and the experience may teach them how tough it can be sometimes to do keyword research that is practically useful.
Your lesson in the next class can then help them see the “old way of keyword research” versus the “new way of keyword research” – and the lesson will be better learned, because they may have gone down the old way and are now open to seeing how else keyword research can be done.
Give them some case study or challenge to ponder about before the next class
Another great “prep-ploy” to use, that students always love is to give them a case-study to ponder over and try to solve before your next class. Give them a situation of complexity or challenge in a case study that relates to the topic you are going to teach next – and ask them to see how they may have come up with innovative solutions.
Then in the next class, you can show them the three best ways to solve the case study perhaps, and give them the learnings that you want to emphasize as takeaways from the case study.
One of the great advantages of holding students’ attention between lessons is this: when students have something to do before the next class, they will show up for the next class, if only to see how they have fared vis-à-vis how they should have fared. This helps prevent many a dropout – the bane of most courses.
Hear These Experts On This Topic …
Andrea Hickerson in the article “Take My Advice”:
Teaching online requires more up-front work, particularly designing and inputting course materials thoughtfully into a course management system. It’s true that a lot of online teaching success is about course organization, like making sure content is clear, posted in the right place and linked to working supplementary materials. You have to anticipate student questions.
However, over time and through peer critique I’ve been able to see online teaching as more than just mastery of course management software, but an exciting new sandbox to experiment with different creative teaching methods — if I let myself be open to them.”
Jill Phillips in the article “7 Tips On How To Prepare For Teaching Online”:
Your students are not physically in front of you. In fact, they probably will never all be online at the same time, and they’re probably in completely different time zone. Gone are the days where “just winging it” will cut it. Planning is essential for an online classroom environment. Virtual students are different – their needs are different from their physical counterparts. Be sure to have your syllabus and materials laid out clearly before class starts.
This will give students an opportunity to see if your classroom (the deadlines, materials, and other requirements) can fit into their lives. The biggest thing, avoid surprises at all costs. Saying, “Surprise! Pop quiz” in a physical classroom is entirely different from posting “Surprise! Pop quiz! Due by midnight.” in an online classroom.”
Teach.com in the article “Teaching Online”:
Teaching online can open up interesting opportunities. Always wanted to teach at UCLA but live in Minnesota? Teach online! Want to moonlight but want to keep your full-time job? Teach online! Don’t have your PhD yet but want teach postsecondary classes? Teach them online!
The “take it anywhere” and adjunct-friendly nature of online teaching means flexibility with where you can teach and getting started even if you’re not sure you want to be a professor full time or if you’re still working toward earning your doctorate (and we all know how long that can take).”
So What Are Your Thoughts? Do Share!
This post is incomplete without your input. The community of Knowledge Commerce solopreneurs would feel galvanized to hear from you … so do share your thoughts on this topic with us, in the comments field below this post.
Related Articles From Our “Creating & Promoting Courses For Knowledge Commerce: Guide”
- How To Pick Online Course Topics … 10 Clever Strategies
- How To Create Engaging Online Courses … 10 Pro Techniques
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