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Five Tips for Enhancing Teaching Skills Online

Many times, it isn’t that traditional faculty and trainers don’t have enough content with which to work, the deal is that they need the skills to EVOLVE the content into usable online teaching tools, and to WORK with that new content in an online classroom.

Following are a few useful teaching strategies that you can use in the online classroom:

Communication Skills Development

This tends to be the area that can make the most difference in online learner retention and persistence (whether the learners stay with the course long enough to finish the class). Strategies here are surprisingly simple, yet powerful in helping students learn online.

1. Provide consistent, regular feedback, both to individuals in the class and to the group as a whole. This makes a tremendous difference in setting a good example for adult learners, particularly those new to online learning. Many adult learners need an online role model to emulate; demonstrating a positive example of good online learning practices early helps build good online learning practices for that student.

2. Provide high quality online documents, such as handouts, resources, syllabi, and other similar educational tools. There is nothing more discouraging than seeing online course documents full of typos and other errors; set a good example by using only the best teaching/educational models in your online classes.

3. Practice consistency and fairness in your online “coaching” of the class. This is particularly important for online classes that require a faculty member or trainer’s presence. The nature of discussion and debate can lend itself to differing (yet valid) opinions. It is the facilitator’s responsibility to ensure a positive, fair, and effective learning environment. As such, gentle reminders to learners to accept differences of opinion in the spirit of learning are helpful, as are individual notes (when necessary) to help learners build a strong and effective learning experience.

Technical Management Skills

One thing we know about technology is that it isn’t perfect. The online classroom presents a number of interesting challenges to resolve when it comes to technology, regardless of whether you are a new or experienced faculty member. How faculty and trainers manage these issues can make a difference in learning quality in the online classroom.

4. Have a backup plan in place so that the course can go on. Sometimes, servers go down, and unpredictably. A good idea is to provide alternative ways for learners to send in class materials, such as by fax, email, snail mail, and the like. Also, it is a good idea to instruct learners to ALWAYS contact technical support if there are problems…sometimes the issue may be due to an individual’s connection to the server as opposed to an entire system problem.

5. Be prepared to answer technical questions, even if this isn’t your area of expertise. The goal for the faculty member is not to have that person become a tech expert on top of being the content expert (unless that is what he or she wants to do!), but to have that faculty member help the learner find answers, or at least direct the learner to a solutions source quickly and efficiently. (It always helps to have a technical support number handy for just such emergencies.)