More on teaching Online Courses

Create your own Wordle at wordle.net

Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, also recommends reading the section Teaching Online Courses in his publication The Super Book of Web Tools for Educators to prepare for teaching online. The section is written by Cory Plough.

Cory Plough starts out by saying "good teaching is still good teaching" (p 47) and I couldn't agree more. It doesn't matter what kind of fancy stuff you are trying to hide behind - your teaching still needs to be good and efficient. I would dare to say that you have to be an even better teacher to teach online, since it is harder to correct your teaching mistakes as you can't see the reactions of the students. You have to be able to see what kind of troubles your students can get in and how you can help them around these obstacles.

Cory Plough suggests that you need to "adapt your skills and expand your toolbox", when teaching online. He also suggests you need to develop additional strategies in for major areas:

1. Communication: You need to be more specific and you need to remember that you don't have any mimic to enhance what you are saying.
2. Course development: It takes a lot more time to build an online course, since you need to spend more time on research and you need to pay attention to details.
3. Feedback: write all your feedback with the intention that the students will redo the missed questions.
4. Find engaging material: it is not a good idea to reuse for example old handouts from f2f-teaching. Find new engaging material that is suitable for online learning.

I have tried to expand my toolbox over the last month, but I think I still have some work to do. I could need some help with how to record and post audio and video, that is I would like to know if there is any good freeware that I could use to record and work with audio and video. I would also be happy if somebody could suggest some good tutorials.