Online Teaching & Learning: Simple Guidelines

Online learning... online teaching... online education... all these buzzwords are increasingly familiar to people involved in education. It is no longer an option. It is not meant to substitute the traditional face-to-face education but rather to complement it and to work in tandem. Smart educators would LEVERAGE online technology to achieve greater impact beyond the physical boundary of the traditional classroom.

A common question—How do I get started? For beginners, moving from face-to-face to online teaching can be intimidating and overwhelming because there are various options available. For those aspiring to be part of the global educators or edupreneur, however, teaching online provides great opportunity to unlock their creativity and share the valuable knowledge and skills with the global lifelong learners. These following tips may help you start your first online course....

Start with the student in mind: Who are they? Where are they? What sorts of devices do they use to access e-learning?

Decide whether to use synchronous or asynchronous activities. Online class should be designed to have a good balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning. However, you may need to think of your students. The choice of synchronous or asynchronous mode would depend on the bandwidth and devices accessible to the students. You should decide which mode is best for a given situation.

Choose a few tools and use it effectively.

To teach online you need to learn online learning activities, just learn a few tools & stick to it.

Deliver content into bite-size lessons.

Don't focus on covering the syllabus but empower students to uncover it.

Bear in mind that an average human attention span is less than 9 seconds. Thus, when you prepare a content like a video, keep it simple, keep it short, keep it light....avoid cognitive overload.

Lastly, make your course interactive & engaging!