With technology changing the face of education, today online teaching has become the most popular mode of teaching and learning. Online teaching provides many advantages over traditional offline methods of teaching such as flexibility to teach and learn from anywhere and at any time, mass reach, greater scalability and affordability, ease of access, highly engaging and dynamic course content just to name a few. With more and more educators and students shifting towards online teaching across the globe, the eLearning industry has shown tremendous growth over the past two years and the trend has shown no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
With accelerated growth however, we have also witnessed a rise in the innovative approaches towards teaching and new pedagogical ideas and tools are being adopted day in, day out. Some educators might face some challenges while trying to get accustomed to the relatively new and dynamic field of online teaching.
Online teaching tutorials and articles across the internet mostly talk about the things which the educators should do in order to flourish in the online teaching environment. However, equally important is knowing about the things which can hamper your productivity and success as an educator, in the online teaching business, and therefore must be avoided at all costs. Here are the most common online teaching pitfalls which any educator looking to establish their career in the eLearning industry must try to avoid. So, without further ado, let us take a look at each one of them….
Translating Offline Courses to Online Classes-
While there is no specific difference between online and offline courses, it is quite evident that a course designed for an offline classroom can’t be translated effectively into an online course. Even if you did try to do such a thing, you’d be forgoing off the tremendous benefits and ease of teaching which some of the best app to teach online provide the educators. It is one of the most rudimentary mistakes where the educators try to re-create an offline course in an online environment as it is. It is not to say that you can not use your offline material for creating an online course, after all the knowledge and information to be passed onto the students will remain mostly the same. But, it is advisable to do so while keeping the basic differences between offline and online teaching in mind such as using multimedia and highly graphic content for online classrooms instead of more textual course content suitable for an offline classroom.
Talking too much-
In an online classroom, educators can not always know what the students are up to. If the students find your approach boring, they can easily get distracted and drift off in an online class. Talking too much is almost always a guaranteed way of tossing the student engagement in your online class out of the window. Therefore, in an online class educators should focus more on inculcating an active learning environment where the students participate in their own learning and are therefore highly engaged with the course content. The passive instruction-based teaching approach just isn’t suitable enough in an online class.
Posting Tiresomely Long Video Tutorials-
Tutorial videos are a great way of getting your point across to all the students at the same time in a fun and interactive manner. Educators should make sure that they learn the art of creating short, precise and highly engaging tutorial videos. Keep your focus on creating tutorial videos which are as short as possible. If you are teaching a long and complex topic, explain it with the help of multiple short tutorial videos than one tiresomely long video as it will negatively affect the student engagement in your class.
Less Focus on the Design and Aesthetics while Creating Courses-
Students can’t be expected to learn effectively from a material which is too difficult to figure out. In other words, educators should ensure that the information is presented as neatly and as comprehensively as possible. Try to use various online teaching tools to design a course which is well put-together and engages the students.
Online teaching is not only the present but the future of education as well. Educators should keep in mind the things they should avoid while teaching online just as much as the things they need to follow, in order to make their online teaching journey, a pleasant and rewarding one.