Teaching an online class requires additional skills that you may not normally use when teaching in-person classes. In an article in the magazine eLearn, Michelle Everson, a statistics teacher, shares 10 things that she learned about teaching online over the course of 5 years.

A few experiences of online teaching

A few relevant points are from experiences of online learning as listed in article are:

Communication can take longer

One issue that new online eeducators may not consider is that "questions that can be answered verbally in the classroom require a written explanation in the online course, and sometimes, it takes more time to write out a sensible explanation than to say it." In Canvas, it's easy to use video or audio to explain, but, for most faculty, writing will come more naturally.

The workload is more diffuse

In the online setting, though, the workload is distributed. Students will likely be working at different times during the week, and their questions will trickle in accordingly. Plus, an activity that might take 20 minutes to complete in a classroom setting might take a few days to discuss online, especially if students are not able to be online together at the same time

Students may expect an online class to be less work than an in-person class

Based on a long history of correspondence courses that required no active engagement or interaction, students often think online courses are simply correspondence courses online. Real online courses require both student-educator interaction and student-student interaction on a regular basis.

You don't have to think of your class in terms of time blocks

In an in-person class, you may regularly run out of time to finish discussing or explaining something. You may choose to start the next class by finishing the previous class session or you may choose to let it go and move on to what you had planned for the next class. In an online class, all of your explanations and examples are there in a module for your students from the beginning so you won't run out of time. In addition, if students want to continue discussing questions related to the original module, they can do so in its discussion forum without taking time away from the discussion in the following module.

Watch and reflect

In the following video (2:28 min), the University of Technology, Sydney, describes some of their experiences of transitioning completely to online delivery. In the video a number of advantages of online delivery are described as well as recommendations for how to transition form campus to online modalities. The video highlights the skill of educator in designing the learning experience. On the next page we will look in more detail at what learning design entails.

Reflect on the following: How do you approach designing your course for online delivery? Have you personally experienced this form of course delivery, as a student or an educator? Where do you start when design for learning in blended delivery modes? Write you reflections in your reflection log.