Online Teaching

Course Overview

This is a self-paced course for instructors to move towards teaching online. The course is constructed as a website. Each page contains key points, concepts (videos and text), information about tools (videos and links), self-check questions with feedback, and recommendations. The last page leads to a discussion forum for interaction.

Here is an overview talk given at IIT Bombay about this course - Transitioning to Online Instruction.

The course is structured into modules that roughly map to the actions that an instructor would do while offering any course. These modules can be accessed on the left menu column (on Desktop/Laptop) OR by clicking the three bars at the top left (on Mobiles/Tablets) from any page. The modules are:

AND a discussion forum. This forum will be used for debating ideas, crowd-sourcing resources and answering queries. The Instructors and TAs will answer queries on a daily basis till July 31, 2020, and twice a week thereafter.

Course Goals

Teaching online can range from uploading lecture notes to full-fledged learner-centric activities in online medium.

The goals of this course are:

  • To help instructors who mostly teach face-to-face classes to get started in online teaching.

  • To address various aspects of the teaching-learning process in the online medium, beyond content delivery.

  • To highlight some key principles, strategies and tools, for effective teaching-learning in this new medium.

  • To make recommendations that are based in evidence from research and practice in online learning.

The following are out-of-scope of this course: In-depth treatment of the principles and their research basis, detailed tutorial of the technology tools, addressing requirements of physical lab or hands-on components, and policy issues such as attendance or exams, which vary from one institute to another.

The course will attempt to maintain low-floor (low entry barrier for getting started), high-ceiling (give links for going all the way to learner-centric MOOCs), and wide-walls (indicate multiple options for achieving a goal). Instructors and Institutes could use this course even if they want move to online instruction partially, say for a few weeks in the semester.


Educational Technology Interdisciplinary Programme

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Note regarding students' access:

It is to be noted that students' access to internet varies widely across the country and across institutes. While the principles outlined in this course are applicable across contexts, the mechanisms for their implementation have to be designed depending on the specific context of one's own students. There are issues of availability of power, access to computers, internet coverage and bandwidth, and data usage charges, that need to be considered while implementing online instruction in a student-friendly manner. A detailed discussion of different implementation mechanisms for ensuring that students are able to access the instruction, is beyond the scope of this course.

Note for Institutes:

Any specific recommendations in this course, such as a tool to be used or a strategy/procedure to be followed, are likely to be based in the context of IIT Bombay, i.e., they are primarily for IIT Bombay instructors.

These recommendations may not hold as is for other institutions. However, the course provides multiple options for doing a given task. In order to come up with recommendations specific to an institute, the following process could be used: (i) A group of interested faculty from the institute could go through this course and the options in detail. (ii) They then take the local context into account and come up with recommendations specific to their institute. (iii) They create a derivative of this course having only the material pertinent to faculty at their institute. (iv) The majority of faculty in that institute go through their local course, and refer to this one only if required.

To explicitly allow such derivatives, this work is licensed under Creative Commons.