Effective Online Teaching

The underpinning of education is that teachers help students. Whether we are called teachers, instructors, faculty, professors, or facilitators, this is the essence of teaching—helping people reach new heights by introducing perspectives and broadening their vantage points. At its heart, effective online instructors need to be accessible and eager to help our students, which can be achieved by creating a presence, maintaining instructional integrity, and structuring priorities.

Creating and Maintaining Presence

Creating and maintaining a presence in the online classroom must be consciously constructed. Having less or limited face time with students in a more virtual, digital, or asynchronous learning experience requires intentionality in creating and maintaining presence.

One model for effective online teaching and learning is the Community of Inquiry model presented by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson at the University of Calgary. An online classroom is essentially a Community of Inquiry—a place where teachers and learners interact and hopefully spark curiosity and inquiry around the subject matter.

The first presence is the social, or personal presence. This is easily achieved in a face-to-face classroom by showing up and being yourself. Students get a feel for who you are and what you’re going to ask of them. It becomes significantly harder to achieve in an online environment. As an online instructor, you need to consider how you’re sharing your personal presence. What you do as an instructor conveys whether you’re authentic, relatable, and accessible.

These three attributes help students feel safe to take educational risks and try new ways of talking about the class material and concepts. Letting students know hidden pieces about your personality or persona, even whether you’re willing to receive text messages for instance, can go a long way to establishing this presence.

The cognitive, or intellectual, presence means connecting practical experience with the subject matter and content of the course. This presence frequently comes out in discussions, whether synchronous or asynchronous, as well as in-class announcements or brief, micro-learning videos or even micro-lectures.

It conveys first-hand experience with content out in the field and can truly resonate with students as you provide student-specific, actionable feedback, maybe pointing them to an industry journal or even to a relevant hashtag on LinkedIn. This presence is about knowing when and where the material appears in the course and being able to lead students to it for effective scaffolding, interleaving, and learning. Allowing submissions of project drafts that build upon one another with frequent feedback along the way is an example of this presence.

The third presence, the teaching or instructional presence, is having a thorough understanding of the course content and how it serves students in terms of their ability to attain the outcomes and objectives of the course. Building a course involves choosing the right text, articles, and multimedia, and designing assessments to help course materials come to life for students, so it sticks with them. Adult learners in particular are drawn to assignments and content with immediate relevance to their current careers or future goals.

These three presences combine to create an online educational experience for students. Social and cognitive presence overlap in classroom discussions. Cognitive and teaching presence overlap in selecting primary or supplemental material. Teaching and social presence overlap in setting the climate and expectations of the online course and classroom itself.

Instructional Integrity

There are differences between traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms and the online format. As an effective online instructor, it is critical to maintain instructional integrity while moving the lessons, discussions, and assignments from a traditional setting into an online environment. This can be accomplished by:

• Identifying the most salient assignments or aspects of the course to maintain the integrity of the learning outcomes or course competencies.
• Trusting authentic assessments (while not everything in a traditional format will be relevant in an online environment, the focus needs to shift from a “time on task” approach).
• Choosing flexible assessment tools, but consistent across rubrics, sections, etc., and
• Being aware of contract cheating and trends in artificial intelligence. Ensure that assignment prompts are unique and require students to incorporate personal experiences.

Effective online instruction does not happen in isolation. There should always be some type of community of practice for faculty to connect. This is a platform where regular connections can occur between faculty and deans, administrators, and peers where they can share best practices and crowd-source answers to their questions. It allows for transparency in communication and a consistent approach and message to all online instructors.

Structuring Priorities

Unlike traditional environments, effective online instructors are often not required to “show up” physically to a particular place at a particular time. As such, structuring priorities become even more important in this modality.

Multitasking is a biological impossibility that can lead to an increase in errors, a decrease in creativity, and limits productivity. Working on one task at a time or monotasking, even briefly, leads to greater productivity. Three keys to time management and monotasking include:

• Working in small increments
• Holding oneself accountable
• Forgiving oneself

Making small changes can lead to increased productivity. For example, you could consider grading all of one assignment on a particular day. Instructors should hold themselves accountable by setting deadlines, but also allowing for regular check-ins with co-workers or other faculty members, which can be even more valuable. Finally, forgiving mistakes related to time management and priorities can be challenging, but dwelling on mistakes is not helpful.

Traditional time management tools such as the Eisenhower matrix can be valuable for online instructors. Here is a brief example of the four quadrants outlined below in this method.

• Quadrant 1: Do first. Should include tasks that are important to complete today or tomorrow at the latest.
  • Example: Student grading to be completed with substantive, personalized feedback within the grading deadline.
• Quadrant 2: Schedule. Includes tasks that are important but less urgent and can be scheduled on the calendar.
  • Example: Creating a new assignment in the Learning Management System (LMS) to be completed by next week.
• Quadrant 3: Delegate. Tasks that do not have to be completed by you could be passed to a more appropriate person where possible or set aside for a later time.
  • Example:Initially planned to work on the discussion board today; however, three students have submitted questions that need attention. Since the discussion board can be done tomorrow, reorganizing plans to accommodate answering student questions in a timely way is important.
• Quadrant 4: Don’t do. Habits and tendencies that you simply want to remove from your daily practices. These could include activities that keep you from greater success in managing items in the first two quadrants.
  • Example: Searching the internet for something specific that leads you down a time-consuming tangent.

Our brains are programmed to procrastinate, but individual levels of procrastination differ greatly. As a result, a key to overcoming procrastination is to make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller.

Make the benefits of action feel bigger:

• Visualize the satisfaction of completing the task at hand. For example, consider what you might do after you’ve completed the task.
• Commit publicly. Tell a colleague you will email them a deliverable, which will create accountability. It is the same thing that we ask of our students when we publicly share due dates for assignments.
• Think about the downside of putting off the task. While this can lead to negative thoughts, it is a helpful tool to consider if you are tempted to put something off until later that needs to be completed now.

Make the cost of action feel smaller:

• Identify the first step. Achieving that small goal provides motivation to complete the task. Continue to chunk things into smaller tasks to help prioritize.
• Tie the first step of a task you’re avoiding to a task that you are looking forward to. In other words, if you have to call a student to have a difficult conversation, reward yourself by watching an episode of your favorite television show afterward.
• Remove hidden blockages. Ask yourself questions about why you may be struggling in that area and you may learn more about why you are putting something off.

Motivation in Online Instruction

American psychologist and motivation theory scholar Frederick Herzberg said, “I can charge a person’s battery, and then recharge it, and recharge it again. But it is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it.”

This speaks to the importance of intrinsic motivation in both faculty members and students. While external factors such as earning a paycheck or a degree are important, internal factors will make a significant difference. Three key ways to do this include: link your actions to a greater purpose, don’t wait until you “feel like” doing something, and implement the CAR model.

• Link your actions to a greater purpose. You can always reframe your narrative. Consider the story of when JFK asked a janitor at NASA what he was doing. He said he was helping a man get to the moon. Think about the impact you have on the lives of your students in your work.
• Don’t wait until you “feel like” doing something. Often, once you get started, you get into the flow of something and it is much easier than you anticipated. If “just doing it” does not work well for you then consider establishing a routine.
• Competency, autonomy, and relatedness. There are different drivers behind our motivation. If we have competency, autonomy, and relatedness, we are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to do something. If you are lacking any of these three things, work towards achieving them. For example, if you lack competency in an area, seek guidance from a colleague or mentor who excels in that area. If you lack relatedness, seek to make more frequent and personalized connections with your students.

Effective online teaching requires teachers who care about and connect with their students. The set of skills necessary for this role can be strengthened by utilizing the resources available through institutions. Creating presence, maintaining instructional integrity, and structuring priorities are three keys to being an effective online teacher.

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Emma Lynch

Emma Lynch is the senior director of Faculty Training & Development and an online instructor at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) where she has worked for nearly a decade. She holds a master’s of arts in English language literature from SNHU as well as a master’s in education in instruction with a literacy focus from Franklin Pierce University.