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Teaching in the online modality can be tricky on its own, so what can you do when you have a large class?

Whether experienced in or new to online teaching, following these tips on online instruction can make the process more intuitive. The online environment may seem vastly different from the classroom, but these tips will make it feel natural, allowing you to improve student experience, increase teaching efficacy, cultivate engagement, and ensure successful course management.

You are building a course for the online environment. What an exciting adventure! When building an online course, you might use a similar method to what you used when developing a course previously, or you might use an entirely new technique. Either option is a good option. But you may have a few questions when you first begin: How do I organize my materials? How do I display my materials? How do I make sure my students work together?

Consistent and meaningful instructor presence is one of the most important drivers of student success and satisfaction in online courses (Roddy et al., 2017). However, establishing instructor presence online can be challenging. In fact, studies have shown that many online students feel their instructors are largely invisible (Tichavsky et al., 2015).

If you’re developing a course with synchronous and asynchronous elements, you have a host of options for engaging students and delivering content. Research suggests that incorporating multiple modalities increases accessibility, engagement, and learning (Mick and Middlebrook, 2015; Margolis et al., 2017). With that said, it is important to be intentional about multimodal course design. Both synchronous and asynchronous methods of delivery are effective, but activities can be better suited to one or the other modality and synchronous time is often limited. Delivering selected content asynchronously can support students’ understanding of how information is organized and leave more time for interactivity in synchronous sessions.

From trivia games to final exams, quizzing tools have a variety of uses for learning as well as assessment. Exams and quizzes have a particularly plentiful range of possibilities in a multimodal or hybrid course, where they can be administered synchronously or asynchronously. Research suggests that the presentation of a tool influences student behavior in response to the tool. When comparing two student discussion boards, one an ungraded discussion and one a graded replacement for a final exam, Cheng et al. (2013) found that students displayed more knowledge on the graded board but more evidence of learning on the ungraded board. The students who participated in the study were more likely to grapple with new ideas when the stakes were low but more eager to showcase topics they were confident about when their responses would have a greater impact on their grades. When considering quizzing tools, we recommend allowing your course goals to guide your usage.

The Third Space theory, introduced by postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, explores a transformative space where new identities and meanings emerge through the interaction of diverse cultural elements. This "third space" is characterized by hybridity, challenging rigid, binary notions of identity and culture, and emphasizing fluid negotiations between dominant and marginalized perspectives (Burke, 2012; Lin, 2014). Bhabha’s theory builds on Ray Oldenburg’s (1999) concept of the "third place"—an informal public space where people gather to form a community that is neither home nor work—and extends it into the realms of cultural and social discourse, creating a broader framework for negotiating power, identity, and cultural exchange (Bhabha, 2012). These third spaces can emerge in a variety of contexts, including both physical locations like cafés or parks and virtual environments such as online forums or social media platforms, making the theory applicable to both in-person and digital interactions.