See our seven simple tips on best teaching online, including recommendations and resources for each recommendation.
Tip #1: Simplify and focus on key learning goals
The first step in putting your course online is prioritizing the key learning goals for your course and then deciding on the content, activities, and assessments you will need to develop.
Mapping out your course structure can help to identify what parts of your course you quickly transfer and what elements require redesign or modification.
Aligning content and assessments with key goals is particularly important when moving your course online within a limited timeframe to focus your time and energy where it will have the greatest impact.
- Create a blueprint or design outline for your course before developing materials that identify learning goals, content needs, and learning activities for each module. Look for opportunities to simplify. What elements are most important, what will you have time to complete, and what can you remove?
- When designing your course for the 6-week summer term, it is also helpful to consider how to reuse materials for a full term. For example, if you build two lesson topics per week for summer, these can then be broken out later into 12 weekly lessons.
- If you use synchronous sessions, map out what you will do in the live (synchronous) sessions, what can be done independently (asynchronously), and how you will connect activities across the two spaces. Then, be reasonable with synchronous sessions and prioritize activities that benefit from live, simultaneous interaction.
- Identify where to reuse existing content or open educational resources rather than creating everything from scratch to save time.
Tip #2: Simple and consistent course organization
Organize your course into topics and weekly modules to make it easier for students to navigate the course structure and track what they must do each week. This organization allows for more flexibility for students to manage their time and provides a predictable rhythm of time and expectations each week.
Break apart hour-long lectures into shorter “chunks” based on the topic. Shorter videos make it easier for students to maintain engagement and allow you to reuse the videos later.
Start by developing one module to refine the design, usually from the middle of the course, not Week 1. Get feedback on the design and adjust before applying the same structure to the other modules.
Tip #3: Instructor presence and active communication
Online courses are not just “set and forget.” Students need to see you actively engaged in the course, being responsive to their questions and interacting with them. Online students can feel isolated. Having an instructor actively engaged in the course helps bridge the social distance and provides support and motivation.
- Communicate frequently about critical due dates, assignment expectations, etc. Online students often need help keeping track of schedules and due dates across multiple courses than face-to-face courses.
- Post a short announcement each week to summarize the weekly activities, respond to student questions, and provide messages of motivation. These can be short videos or text. Note that videos don’t need to be high-budget. A simple cellphone recording is better for allowing students to see you as a person and foster a sense of connection.
- Use the discussion forums to interact with students and respond to questions that stimulate further discussion.
- Seek feedback from students about how the course is going:
- Release an early to mid-course survey to get student feedback and suggestions about improving the learning experience.
- Create a discussion forum or anonymous form where students can flag issues or post suggestions.
Tip #4: Create community through peer interactions
Students in online classes often feel isolated and detached. They commonly learn alone and can’t easily turn to another classmate to ask questions when they need clarification. In a face-to-face classroom, presence is implicit. Students can see the other students and talk to them. However, there is no sense of presence in an online environment unless students participate in some way.
Therefore, when designing an online course, it is important to anticipate the sense of isolation and actively take steps to humanize the non-human online environment by purposely creating spaces for students to share and interact with each other.
- Add an icebreaker activity at the beginning of the course to get students comfortable communicating online. Set up a forum for course questions and encourage students to post and respond to each other instead of only messaging the instructor.
- Create regular discussion activities and provide expectations for participation.
- Utilize other tools for peer learning, such as social annotation activities using video, images, or text.
- For large courses, use the Canvas groups feature to break students into smaller groups where they can have more manageable discussions.
Tip #5: Provide ongoing opportunities for practice and assessment
You can not expect students to read lecture content and learn by working through it independently online. Learning outcomes are more successful if students have activities where they can apply what they’ve learned and receive feedback. This is true for in-person courses but even more important in online courses, where it is easier to disengage from video lectures or readings.
Self-assessment activities and frequent low-stakes assessments provide more opportunities for practice and feedback than fewer high-stakes assessments. For organizing large projects online, break them into stages with multiple checkpoints and feedback opportunities before the final project is due.
Guided worksheets for readings or reflection questions help students focus on the most important concepts.
Tip #6: Design opportunities for regular feedback
It can be easy for students online to fall behind, and it may be difficult for them to assess how they are doing. They can’t quickly turn to another student and ask for clarification, so they require ongoing opportunities to check their understanding and get feedback.
Online instructors also receive fewer cues about how well their students understand the material, as there are no confused faces in seats indicating that something needs further explanation.
For online courses, it is important to design regular opportunities for students to check their knowledge, for instructors to see how they are doing and to provide constructive or corrective feedback where necessary.
While it may be overly time-consuming to provide individualized feedback in large courses, it is possible to identify common misconceptions or examples and then create a short video or announcement each week where you address them.
Utilize peer assessment tools or discussion forums to create opportunities for students to share their work and get feedback from other students.
Tip #7: Be mindful of student accessibility, equity, and diversity
Online learners may encounter many challenges, such as varying access to the internet and technology, different countries and time zones, and balancing home life and school commitments.
Students may also be removed from support services available on campus and find it more challenging to connect with the support they need to be successful.
Send out a survey at the beginning of the term to identify if students have access challenges or accessibility support needs.
Be thoughtful with your use of synchronous sessions, which are high bandwidth and can present logistic challenges, particularly for students in different countries and time zones. If you use synchronous sessions, make a recording available in case students can’t attend.
