Boosting Your Online Teaching Presence Based on Research
Ever since the pandemic hit the world, education shifted to online mediums. This is not easy for the teachers. They need to help students overcome online learning challenges and make sure that they get good grades.
The challenges include their passive behavior by becoming bystanders during the online lectures, you need to engage them. Another challenge is lack of discipline, at home you can not discipline the students. They have multiple distractions and you will not even know when they got distracted. Last but not the least, lack of motivation. Without someone to look after and motivate them, some students will slowly start to drift and lose motivation.
To overcome this you need to have a strong online teaching presence based on research. Interested to find out how to do so? Then keep on reading.
Strengthen Your Relationships with Your Students
Have One On One Interactions With Students:
Spending one on one time with your students, especially those who are struggling with behavioral and mental issues. During online live lectures there are a lot of students whose voices are often not heard. Having a personal chat with them allows them to have your attention. It makes them feel that they have a voice and you care about it. It also frees them of the pressure to be good because of other students’ presence. Therefore they are more honest with you regarding their problems.
You also need to structure these meetings to make sure they are pleasant and conversational. You can ask a student what is going on in their lives or how their family is doing. Then proceed to ask questions like how they feel about your online classes. This will help you foster a strong connection with your students and they will act out less during lectures.
Find Something To Comment On:
There are a lot of students who are trying their best in online classes. These classes are not the same as physical ones though. Therefore when referring to commenting on your students, you have to choose something abstract. You can not compliment them on their hair, clothes, or accessories. Therefore comment on their abilities.
For example, if a student has been turning in their homework earlier than usual, compliment him/her. If there is a student who has been regularly attending your online class, compliment him/her. If a student has good conversational skills, compliment him/her. Commenting on their work and abilities will strengthen your relationship with those students and encourage them to improve themselves.
Go With Their Interest:
Online learning can get boring rather fast. You need to maintain the students’ attention in your class. Unlike physical classes, you can not tell if the student is really paying attention to the lectures. Sure, you can throw in some questions and ask a random student to answer them, but there is a better way. Although you can not ensure if the students are paying attention you should try to keep them interested.
Let’s suppose that all you students love gaming. You can center the examples of your lesson on gaming. For example, when explaining to them how to make a business succeed, give them examples regarding games that made it big.
You can also relate events to the game. For example, an event in the country that happened at the same time a popular gaming mode was released. This way you are not only indulging in their interest but also creating associations. So now every time the students remember the game mode he/she will remember the political event.
Share Your Stories:
Storytelling is one of the best ways to connect with your students and strengthen the bond. Students usually find all sorts of stories compelling but you should tell only the harmless ones. Start telling them stories regarding former students. They will like to know about those who ones here in the same sees as they are now.
Whatever subject you are teaching, you can share about it with them. For example, what was it like when you were a student learning this subject? What makes you passionate about it? Share with them some of your teaching experience as well. This way students will get to know you better, you will bond with them and it makes learning interesting.
Students will have a lot of fun. Making learning fun is associated with reward and pleasure with information, strengthening and broadening memory networks (Shukla, 2019). Therefore, the students’ performance level will also increase.
How To Motivate Your Students For Online Classes?
Make Your Class Interactive:
The best way to make sure that students are listening is to ask them questions. Online classes for university students are heavily based on lectures. It has smaller grouped seminars for discussion afterward. In a two-hour lecture, it becomes easy for students to switch off and get distracted.
You can maintain student engagement by keeping them on their toes by asking questions. Not wanting to answer the question incorrectly students’ engagement rates will increase. This will let you have an amazing online teaching presence.
Encourage Collaboration:
Students find lessons more encouraging when they are collaborating with each other in form of group projects. Integrating this into an online class is bound to motivate students. Using an online learning platform will be helpful in this scenario. You are automatically set up as administrators. Then you have to split their classes into smaller groups through a simple and easy-to-use dashboard.
Give The Rewards:
If you give the rewards from time to time when they achieve something it will motivate them to study harder. Maybe a student wrote an amazing essay on “what is pay someone to take my online class for me services?”. Maybe they turned in most of their essays on time. You have to reward this behavior so that the frequency of this behavior increases.
How to Engage Students In Online Studies?
Let Them Have A Say:
The best way to let students engage in a class is to take their feedback. In online classes, it is easy to get distracted. To engage students in the learning and teaching process they should get the chance to give their feedback. You should ask students about how the course is going and how classes can be improved. Then you should adapt your lessons accordingly.
Students and their willingness to learn is often. Mostly the lack of engagement is what causes them to get distracted or go off-topic. By encouraging their feedback, students will have no excuse to stay unfocused because their suggestions are being practiced.
When students encounter confusion during their online classes they prefer to look for platforms that offer students that we do your online class. This is all fine and dandy but you should try your best to solve their confusion yourself by taking feedback.
Take Quizzes And Give Challenges:
Quizzing students is one of the oldest tricks in the book to increase engagement. They grasp the attention of students almost immediately especially if they are fooled by an incentive. This way you can also recap the previous lessons. Spontaneous quizzes are good for students that engage rarely in online classes. You can not observe if students are paying attention in an online class so this tactic helps a lot.
Your Enthusiasm:
Believe it or not, your enthusiasm has an impact on students. The more lively the teacher is the better students feel. This is more important in online classes because they do get boring at times. Remember to not overdo it because students will see right through it. Stay relatable at all times so students feel comfortable with you.
Boosting Your Online Teaching Presence Based on Research
Grade Scope:
As you know AI has taken over every industry (helpwithdissertation, 2021) and the teaching industry is also one of them. The AI tool uses expertise with the recent ML and AI to make it easy for you to grade. This helps you by saving time and energy through outsourcing the review and grading. Then you can focus on teaching students online.
You can grade online homework, paper-based exams, and programming projects all in one place. This ensures fair grading. It gives meaningful statistics that help in finding out student needs and class trends.
Visme:
Visme is an online design tool that anyone can use to create presentations, infographics, concept maps, schedules, reports, etc. On Visme you can make interactive content like presentations and infographics, visual posters and infographics as well as webinar materials. Moreover, it helps you come up with interactive schedules, planning syllabus and lessons, and worksheets.
Additionally, Visme provides personalized report cards and certificates for the student.
Google Classroom:
Google Classroom is one of the most useful online teaching tools available. This Learning Management System is part of G Suite. This means you can use Google apps to make lessons, quizzes, and documents inside Google Classroom.
Conclusion
Now you know all about boosting your online teaching presence based on research. So go ahead and help students out as much as you can.