I am writer at academicpaperpros.com and I am going to tell you about Proven Tips to Become a Successful Online Teacher. Let uncover the tips.
Know Your Target Audience
This will depend on what platform you are using to teach your students. If you are affiliated with a university, and your target audience is only a class of students, then this will not be difficult. When you have a selected audience, you know what they are looking to achieve through the online class. But if you have a diverse audience like an online learning portal where you teach a course to whoever wants to sign up, now your audience can be 20 years old undergrad students and a 35 years business professional. They both will have very different expectations from your course.
Adult learners and children both have very different attention spans and motivations. At the same time, the children or young people will be taking your online classes just to get good grades while adult learners will be looking for the entire experience. They will want to take the experience from your class and use it in their professional lives. For younger people, entertainment is also very important, a monotonous class will bore them very quickly, and they will start to get distracted.
Communicate
The connection between students and the teacher is critical. Successful teachers are successful because they have, over the years, mastered the art of understanding the students’ psyche and build a connection with them. It is extremely difficult to connect with students who are watching you through a screen, and in most cases, you may not see them. But you have to keep the connection with them in one way or the other. The best way of making connections with students is to include scenarios and practices in your online lectures.
You must be looking in the camera and using your hands and body to communicate with them at all times. Sharing your personal experiences during the class will also help you establish that connection with your online class. If you are addressing an adult learner’s class, make sure you treat them as your peers and not your students. People who are already in professional life do not like to be dealt with as junior students, and that is why your tone will be very different from them. When you establish a connection successfully, you will notice that your students will start to trust you and the learning process as well.
Be Yourself
Be original and be authentic. This is similar to any other profession; you cannot hide your personality for a very long time. Sooner or later, your true energy will be visible to all. In an average classroom, it is very easy to maintain good energy and be in your element, but it becomes very difficult in an online class. At times, you will be challenged in the most unexpected ways, but that will determine how successful an online teacher is.
It is okay not to know something or not to be sure of how an online class works. Nothing is embarrassing about forgetting something while you have your online class; you need to be confident in your own skin. Build trust with your students and have your own way of teaching. You do not have to follow another teacher’s way of teaching because you think that you will connect with your students. The online class is also like hit and trial; nothing will work on the first try; give yourself the time to get comfortable in front of the camera, and then you can experiment.
Try New Things
Just like online learning is a new practice, you might have to change a few other things as well. Many teachers favor allowing their students to use digital mediums to learn, but times have changed now, and teaching methods also have to change accordingly. It is recommended that teachers provide students with links to online videos and tutorials to aid their learning process. Online classes have a lot of perks, but they also restrict the learning process in more than one way. The absence of physical communication and interactions can make learning a little difficult for students.
The teachers and students can also make communication groups on messaging platforms where they can share their queries and get instant answers. This will play a significant part in reducing the distance between the teacher and his students.
Flexibility
Try to be flexible; it is okay to adjust a deadline or extend a submission’s time. Being in an online class, your students may come from diverse backgrounds and maybe going through circumstances. You also have to cut some slack to the use of technology. Technology has changed a lot, and hence online classes are made possible, but it can also be very unpredictable at times. If we consider the pandemic we are in, we cannot predict the conditions at the student’s end, which is why the teacher must improvise.
Many successful teachers have practiced that they have tweaked the grading system to accommodate the students better. This encourages students to put in their best effort no matter what the conditions they are facing. Motivation is the one thing that gets the best out of a student.
Improve the Visuals
You might not have paid much attention to it before, but this requires all your concentration now. Work on the visuals you present to your students because that is the medium you are using now to communicate with the students. Many teachers in normal classrooms do not use a lot of visuals and rely on their own conversing skills to convey the lecture, but that needs to change in online classes. For starters, reduce the amount of text you include in slides; your main focus is to keep your student engaged. People’s attention span is short, and when you are at home studying, you have even more distractions; visuals in the slides of the presentations will be more engaging.
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