Five Ways to Succeed as an Online Instructor

Whether experienced 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.

Since online courses are compressed, preparation is one of the most important aspects of effective online teaching. Becoming familiar with the content, design, and unique aspects of a course will improve the experience for both students and instructors. Attending training sessions and reaching out for support when necessary also enhances the preparation process. In addition, we recommend doing the following:

• Prior to enrollment, conduct a course review, ensuring you understand all the materials and expectations for assignments.
• Review the Instructor Only Module to fully understand course expectations, preferably before students begin the course.
• Coordinate with the university bookstore as needed, communicating accurate textbook and course information in a timely manner.
• Before you teach for the first time, participate in Instructor Training, which is a great place to share related professional experience and find opportunities for professional development.

Clear and consistent communication will ensure that students know what to expect and how to proceed in your course. Because asynchronous communication has unique challenges, such as tone and continuity, expect to make a focused effort when communicating with students on the first day of your course. We recommend doing the following:

• Use language that invites connection and community, describe appropriate communication, and communicate expected response times.
• Set a policy with the aim of responding to emails within 24 hours on weekdays and 48 hours on weekends.
• Always model a professional tone in class communications.
• As soon as possible, notify students of any gaps in your availability, clearly explaining when gaps begin and end and giving instructions as to what students should do for help during gaps in coverage.

Consider how active you will be as an instructor, as students tend to mirror your activity. Engaging early, and expecting students to engage in response, helps establish a sense of community, increasing student engagement while decreasing the likelihood that students will feel isolated and anxious. With regard to engagement, we recommend the following:

• Announcements
  • Post at least one to two announcements per week, summarizing each week's workload, providing helpful hints and instructions, and employing a tone that conveys positive energy. Announcements are also a great place to include popular resources (articles, blogs, podcasts, etc.) that overlap with your course content for the week.
• Discussion boards
  • Think about how you plan to participate in discussion boards. Discussions allow students to engage with course concepts and participate in purposeful conversations, promoting critical thinking and content mastery through knowledge construction. Your feedback and participation in these discussions will more fully engage students, ideally challenging them to offer reasons and cite references.
• Increasing engagement
  • Beyond the basic facilitation of your online course, consider creative ways to increase student engagement in your course, such as linking to your (professional) social media accounts, utilizing analytics to engage less involved students, and creating assignments and tasks that have direct, real-world applications, such as authentic activities, presentations, and case studies.

Online courses have many strengths, but one of the most pressing issues to online instructors is that there are space limitations. Technically courses can be as big or as small as you would like. However, having a large class can be overwhelming when you may have been used to managing classes limited by space. Therefore, we recommend the following:

• Utilize groups to make the course feel like smaller communities. Breaking students into smaller groups can prevent discussion boards from becoming too chaotic or unorganized. In addition, sometimes fewer students allows for more robust discussions.
• Explore peer review options to increase the amount and kind of feedback students receive. Group projects and partner work with a peer review/feedback component can help students to feel that they are building meaningful relationships. Furthermore, peer reviews allow students to help their classmates improve, all the while increasing their own mastery of course objectives.

Grading and managing students’ grades can be problematic for first time instructors. However, your course has many built-in tools that can make grading online more time effective. Plus, there is the added bonus of not having to print all of those pages. Below are some of the approaches we recommend when grading:

• Employ grading tools to increase efficiency; SpeedGrader—a Canvas tool— allows you to quickly and effectively grade documents, with many annotation options.
• Apply rubrics to improve grade consistency. Rubrics can be easily built and integrated into SpeedGrader to seamlessly tabulate grades.
• Enable flexibility in due dates to accommodate student needs. For example, managing students’ extensions in the form of extending due dates, giving extra time and attempts, and allowing resubmissions will be necessary in developing an inclusive and accessible online learning environment.

As you begin teaching your course, you will find tips and tricks that work for you and your needs. But teaching online is not vastly different from in a physical classroom space and as your comfort grows, you will begin to master this new space by following these simple steps.