Teaching Online Courses: Strategies and Resources Strategies When teaching online, you have to develop certain skills that you typically do not think twice about when working with students face-to-face. Below are four key areas where you need to develop additional strategies when teaching online.
1. Communication: Here is a proposition for you, how would you like to try teaching without using your face, hands or voice? Sounds daunting doesn’t. When teaching online there aren’t any non-verbal communication devices….for the most part. Since much of online teaching is currently asynchronous, you have to consider that the student it unable to watch your facial expressions and body language when delivering content. Also, your sense of humor may not transfer so things that are funny out-loud may sound like insults or demoralizing comments in digital text. You need to get very good at being super specific in emails (the main form of online communication), instant messaging and feedback. You want to show emotion through the use of emoticons and acronyms but be careful not to lose that teacher-student relationship by being overly friendly and informal. 2. Course Development: Developing courses online takes 1.5 to 4 times as long as developing a face-toface course. A large part of this is that you have to spend so much time researching curriculum for accuracy prior to publishing the material online. However, the main issue that adds to development time is your necessity for attention to detail. You have to be ultra specific. Think of publishing your online lesson and assessments as the first period of the day or the first time you teach a new lesson. In face-to-face you get to do it 4 or 5 times to perfect it that day, but online when you put something up, it needs to be almost perfect (shooting for perfection) the first time. You are building all your scaffolding into the lesson and laying out details to help eliminate student errors and misunderstanding when they are working from home.
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