Three Tips To Improve Your Online Teaching Skills

Online teaching skills share a lot of crossover with classroom teaching. That said, to maximise the benefits of online teaching, it’s good to tailor your focus and really consider ways you can best take advantage of the medium.

If you want to know how to improve your online teaching career, then you’ve come to the right place. In this handy list of online teaching tips, we’ll be going over some basic approaches you can take to ensure that you’re able to provide your students with the learning experience they’re looking for.

1. Get to Know Your Students

Good teachers are more than just repositories of knowledge. In a time where Google and ChatGPT can provide you with the answer to almost any question in an instant, it’s becoming more apparent than ever that people still value the experience of working one-to-one with a teacher to improve their skills.

Why is this? Well, although these tools are useful they are, in many respects, just a better form of encyclopedia. They can help a person find knowledge, but they can’t do a lot to help them process that knowledge. Even AI tools are limited in their capacity to reword and reorganise information in a way that will suit the student.

As a teacher, on the other hand, you can do all this and more. You can shape your explanations in a way that will fit the student’s current understanding. You can use language and metaphors that are appropriate to them. You can have a back and forth discussion, weeding out misunderstandings and miscommunications.

And all of this is possible by understanding a student’s personality. When you get to know your students, you can learn what motivates them, what their goals are, and which approaches are most likely to work for them.

2. Respect Your Students’ Goals

As a teacher, it can be easy to start imposing your perspective onto a student’s learning. There’s a temptation to build out a road map, to organise a subject with one idea built on another to give your student a well-rounded understanding.

In a traditional classroom, this can be a good approach but if you want to improve your online teaching skills, then this is one mindset you’ll want to leave at the digital door.

When it comes to online teaching, people are generally coming to you because they have a goal in mind. They want a specific job role, or they want to learn a specific skill. As their teacher, you’re well within your rights to tell them what they need to know to get that done, but that choice can be more complicated than you might think.

When deciding what to teach your students, always focus on exactly what they’ve asked you about. Only diverge from this if absolutely necessary. And, while it might be hard to accept at times, if a student doesn’t understand the work they need to put in to achieve their goal, it’s okay to let them go.

When all’s said and done, all you can do is give your best opinion about what you believe they need to do/learn. If they won’t listen, then no amount of persuasion is likely to work. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and let people learn the hard way.

3. Use All The Tools At Your Disposal

As we said before, Google and ChatGPT can usually provide you with the answer to any questions, assuming you know how to identify a trustworthy source and when to double check an AI response. To a teacher, these tools might feel like threats but, if used correctly, they can allow your students to progress faster while still taking full advantage of the experience you bring to the table.

One of the major benefits of online teaching is that these tools are always on hand. This means that both you and your student can look up information and find resources in an instant. This is particularly useful if you’re mentoring someone to work in a constantly changing field where being up-to-date is a vitally important skill.

For example, any good marketer knows that practices change all the time while principles stay broadly the same. If you want to sell a product, you’re always going to have to start by finding out how similar products are sold and what the most successful strategies are at the moment.

The way you judge these strategies and the rules that tend to govern human behaviour will generally be consistent. This means that, as a teacher, you can show your students how to apply those broad principles in researching and developing a specific strategy for the time and place a product is being sold.

To put it more broadly, if you want to improve your online teaching by using the latest tools, then the best thing you can do is embrace one of the oldest methods in the book. You need to teach your students how to learn.

Yes, they can ask AI a question but will they know what to do with the answer? Will they know how to put it into practice and what to look out for along the way? That’s where you can make all the difference.