How to combine the best of offline and online teaching?
It’s not just the location difference
Recently, I was fortunate enough to be invited to be one of the instructors for Le Wagon’s part-time Bootcamp program.
Le Wagon is a coding Bootcamp with locations around the world. The one that I was involved in was based in Shanghai, China.
With that being said, I have taught online courses before then. I have always wondered if I was even able to teach offline since I am an introvert.
The overall experience was more than I could hope for. I discovered some insights that I would like to share with you here.
Difference in Engagement
Truth be told, my online courses currently have horrible course completion rates(around 1 percent). I have tried to get more feedback to understand why.
But if they don’t even have the time to finish the course, they probably don’t have time to fill out the survey.
After teaching offline, I realized my online courses lacked a few things:
Commitment
From both the students and instructors, the level of commitment is night and day with Bootcamp and online courses.
Moneywise, offline Bootcamp can charge higher for its intensity and the extra hand-holding with the instructors right there in your face. Students are less likely to pay and dropout.
Timewise, the Bootcamp program has dedicated time frames. It’s easier to persuade someone when you say you can help them become a ___ in ___ weeks. Rather than, you can become a ___ in some future when you feel like it.
Peer Support
In the Bootcamp, students are paired up in teams. Therefore, your teammates rely on you to produce the final result.
Not only there’s the responsibility to perform for your teammates, but there’s also a sense of competition between teams. Because when demo day comes, those teams demo their project in front of the whole group.
Difference in Feedback
Although I include a survey at the end of the online course, no one ever fills it out. Even if I reach out directly to a student, people are usually “too polite” to give me any feedback on how I can improve.
Feedback from Observation
Offline education provides more opportunities to observe if a student is progressing well or feeling frustrated.
If your lecture is dull or too complex to grasp, it’s easy to tell from their facial expression. It’s valuable information to adjust the content or how the content is delivered.
Encouraged Questions
With the online course, although I provide the students the way to join groups to ask questions. Most people don’t. Maybe they don’t feel connected to the community or they never got around to it.
I can only guess until I started answering questions during the Bootcamp. Most people feel embarrassed by asking questions in public. Maybe it’s because of some bad experience they had during public education.
But when I encourage individual to ask me questions one on one, the flood gate opened. There were more questions than I could have imagined. Well, maybe they weren’t embarrassed, but they probably thought they were the only ones with this problem, so they didn’t want to bother other people’s time.
How can an online course improve?
Here are a few things that I could differently for the next online course:
- Clear enrollment time
- Team projects
- Live stream help-session
- Encourage one on one office hour
- Release class by class in time
- Give students more responsibilities
- Give students the spotlight
If you have other ideas about combining the benefits of offline and online teaching, please feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me.
Conclusion
Online and offline education both have their benefits. How do we combine the best from both worlds is the question.
If you’re always learning, here’s a free online course on self-teaching.
Thanks to Le Wagon China for giving me the opportunities to be a part of this awesome program.
