How to Be a Better Online Teacher – Advice Guide
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Whether you鈥檝e taught online a lot or a little, chances are you didn鈥檛 enjoy it as much as teaching in person. Maybe you didn鈥檛 experience that fizz after a particularly invigorating face-to-face class. Indeed, according to a 2017聽, only 9 percent of academics prefer to teach 鈥渋n a completely online environment.鈥� That means a whopping 91 percent of us don鈥檛. And I suspect that a good majority of that 91 percent would prefer to teach anywhere but online.
Clearly, many academics don鈥檛 see the value of online courses or of trying to become a better online teacher. Almost none of us set out to be great online teachers when we decided to go to graduate school. We鈥檝e spent years in campus classrooms, but we don鈥檛 have the same depth and breadth of experience in the online classroom, as either students or teachers. Most of us don鈥檛 know how to teach online or how to get better at it 鈥� and we may not be motivated to learn. Even more likely, we may not feel like we have time to learn.
For all of those reasons, you may not feel fully invested in your online teaching practice. Yet it can be just as rewarding as teaching in a bricks-and-mortar classroom, if in different ways. Good teaching is good teaching.
Most of us don鈥檛 know how to teach online or how to get better at it 鈥� and we may not be motivated to learn.
Which brings me to the purpose of this guide. What you will find here is advice on how to make your online pedagogy as effective and satisfying as the in-person version, including:
