Learning to Teach Online: Understanding & Optimizing an Online Learning Experience

I’ve been teaching since ’03 and exclusively online for about a decade. Here’s what I wish I’d understood while I made the switch myself.

As many schools and colleges are moving to online learning models in light of COVID-19, I’ve been bombarded with questions about teaching online — both by school teachers and by private tutors and teachers looking for ways to move their studios to virtual environments.

I remember the sincere trepidation I felt when travel demands meant I had to switch to teaching online, and I thought I’d share what I wish I’d understood while I made the switch myself.

What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive list of things to consider if you’re new to teaching remotely or a deep dive into developing curricula specifically for online teaching. I’d also like to preemptively say that while I have quite a bit of experience teaching special needs populations, this article is not intended to serve as a deep dive into teaching students online with special needs, unusual circumstances, or profound learning differences.

Know What You’re Up Against

As in all learning contexts, proactively managing the delicate interplay between student motivation and teacher engagement is the biggest dictator of success in online education.

Children are not known for self-regulation.

Today’s students have an average attention span of something like eight seconds and they aren’t skilled at staying focused without your external reminders. You know this from teaching them live in a classroom or studio; you’ll need to use your experience to consider the predictable problems with engagement and comprehension and manage them even though they may not be happening right in front of you.

That being said, students live most of their lives digitally. An average student will likely experience much less stress at transitioning to a virtual learning environment than their GenX teachers might.

You’ll get through this. Here’s how:

Plan To Actively Manage and Call for Attention

Offer specific instruction on how to quiet distractions before you begin actually teaching anything else.

Tell students to modify their device and computer settings to turn off banner/screen alerts for their iMessages, Instagram, etc.

They’ll need to turn off the vibrate mode for incoming texts, too, as many phones will vibrate during a FaceTime or Skype call.

Many students stream things from YouTube on mute on their laptops while you’re teaching, just the same as if they’d muted the TV in the background to, say, watch the game. Acknowledge this and encourage them to turn other streaming players off.

Verbally note ahead of the lesson what supplies students need to have on hand in order to be ready to take notes or participate effectively.

Most students will start a FaceTime call or press play on their computer or device to learn online otherwise empty-handed. When you say “jot that down” or “put that in your calculator,” they will either walk away or need to interrupt the stream of ideas and tell you to hang on if you haven’t warned them ahead of time to be prepared.

Do they have their notes from last time? Pencils? Calculator? Google doc for note-taking already open? Get them set up ahead of time.

Create a new (and perhaps ridiculous) code words for key points.

In my practice we call these “jelly beans.” Students are accustomed to tuning out teachers in school, and it’s that much easier to do when they’re online. My students know that when I say, “This one is a jelly bean,” I mean to recapture their attention and emphasize that this particular idea is not to be missed. Because the term jelly bean is contextually absurd, students hear it outside the jargon of whatever topic we’re exploring and realize that we’re in a point of emphasis.

If you want to excel at this, you’re going to have to be on camera.

Expecting students to watch you webcast a Power Point presentation with you hiding behind the mic is about as engaging to them as an insurance broker presenting a webcast slideshow about next year’s rates. Your genuine best bet for engagement is to teach in as close to the same environment as you’d be in if you were teaching in person — and that’s going to need to include your smiling, enthusiastic face.

Direct student behavior even if you can’t see your students.

Don’t be afraid to use phrases like “eyes up here” even though your students aren’t in the room. If you’ve exhausted a point and are about to transition to a new idea, call attention back to your face on the screen and encourage students to regroup.

Experience will guide you here. Indeed, every student is a special snowflake, but you also know at what point in teaching the process of, say, completing the square, most students check out. When you’re engaging on something particularly frustrating or protracted, make an extra effort to remind your students — who know you aren’t able to see them mentally check out — to stay on point rather than sinking into the comfort of explaining something blithely unaware of your utterly confounded audience.

It’s counter-intuitive, but bite-sized lessons often discourage note-taking and memorization.

This issue isn’t specific to online learning, but it’s amplified when you’re at virtual arm’s length: a well-conceived five-minute lesson is a thing of beauty, and you’ll need to remind students to take notes after small lessons because they genuinely believe they’ll remember for the long term whatever little bon mot you’ve just dropped because you made it so fast and easy.

Quick lessons are easy to swallow but difficult to absorb.

I am perpetually saying to my students, “I know that sunk in right now, but you won’t remember it if we don’t talk about it for two weeks. Write it down so you can review.”

Continually encourage students to write things down, especially if you’re working in smaller chunks.

Pre-recording lectures or webcasting to groups?

Recognize that typical students will be doing their schoolwork in bed if given the opportunity.

This is true for one-on-one live lessons, too, but it’s almost ubiquitous for students watching pre-recorded videos. This doesn’t matter much except that you have to remember that your audience is genuinely more likely to fall asleep while you’re teaching.

Keep your energy up and your ideas on-point throughout your video.

If you’re recording a lecture, imagine using the same clarity of expression you’d need to use if you were lecturing your passenger while driving down a city street with the radio on.

Because a recorded lesson is naturally less interactive, it’s incumbent upon you to predict sticking points and objections to any given lesson and address them as you go along.

The beauty of this is that you’re about to uncover places in which you need to refine your lessons — and everyone has places to grow.

You’ll also be contending with the new distractions of siblings or YouTube or the waitress at Panera Bread where your student has gone to steal WiFi to study.

If you’re re-scripting lessons to fit a new platform, use the classic introductory writing rule of thumb: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them using different language.

Again, language that calls attention, like “don’t miss this,” or “did you catch that” and “let’s make sure we’re clear” brings students back to your one-sided conversation.

Bite size is good, but thorough is better.

I’ve seen a lot of advice out there to keep recorded lessons to around five minutes — an obvious nod to fleeting attention spans. That being said, inexperienced teachers often overestimate what students already understand and take for granted their own front-loaded fundamentals.

When you feel like you’re in a rush to teach a bite-sized lesson online, it’s easy to lean towards the same predilection for skipping the basics.

In reality, you’re better off teaching two five-minute lessons to cover a single, simple topic than squeezing everything into a shorter lesson. Trust yourself to stretch the material for clarity rather than truncating it for time.

Be kind: encourage the rewind!

Verbally encourage students in your video to rewind and watch something again if it’s important. It’s not a poor reflection on you if a student doesn’t “get it” the first time around. Advocating for a rewind-and-re-watch transmits that your students’ comprehension is most important to you and that it should be to them, too, rather than just the completion of the assigned video viewing.

Start Simply

If you’re an individual like a tutor or music teacher looking to teach online, you do not actually need to launch a branded virtual learning platform and get a studio with lighting and learn Ruby on Rails and become a podcaster and buy microphones and get the blue check mark on Twitter and earn a certificate in Adobe After Effects and write an ebook. K?

In some ways, teaching online is really making a glorified phone call.

Here’s how to get started in a pinch:

· Use Skype or FaceTime for one-on-one calls.

· Send Dropbox links via text message or email for PDF or audio files.

· If you don’t already have a stylus for your iPad, order an inexpensive, low-end Wacom tablet so you can write on a live white board space. These tablets install on your computer via USB or Bluetooth and allow you to use a pen to write on screen with your mouse.

· There are as many free to practically free live white board spaces as there are hairs on your head — Scribblar and Conceptboard come immediately to mind. You do not need to subscribe to something that’s $75 to $100 a month. Use something that mimics a pen and paper and you should be good to go.

Only after you’ve started and taught online for a while will you be able to sense if there are real bells and whistles you need.

· Students who are having lessons on their iPhones or iPads can record their screens under Settings>Control Center>Customize Controls.

The transition to teaching online is largely psychological — manage your own psychology and your students’ experience to maximize the experience and minimize interruptions.

Good luck!

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Elizabeth King is a public scholar, the author of Outsmarting the SAT ’08 and Acing the ACT ’15 (both Ten Speed Press), and principal tutor at her boutique test preparation company, Elizabeth King Coaching, Inc.. She has been teaching high school curricula, writing, and her proprietary test preparation methods to students across the United States and around the world for almost two decades. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Elizabeth is a contributing test authority at Syndicate Media, Inc., a 2020 50CAN National Voices Fellow advocating for equal educational access and excellence, and a class of ’21 graduate student at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College pursing a degree in Learning & Design. Find her at eliabethonline.com or on Twitter @elizabethonline.