Facilitating
online learning was a class I really didn’t think I would take, but I am glad I
did. One thing that stood out to me is
that good teaching is good teaching. Good
lesson planning and development is good lesson planning and development. The same basic elements apply to good
teaching, no matter what the forum.
That
being said, I do realize there are certain things that you need to focus on as
an online teacher. Timely feedback
becomes more important when there is no face-to-face interaction. Thinking about this actually made me realize
all of the opportunities for feedback there are in a traditional setting, and I
think sometimes teachers may miss some of these opportunities.
Building
relationships is also more of a challenge in an online environment, or at least
it is something you have to make a more conscious effort to do. The building of teacher-student and
student-student relationships happens no matter what in a face-to-face
environment, but in an online environment, more thought needs to go into
planning activities that can facilitate the building of these relationships.
In
our last posts we talked about the future of online learning, and like I
discussed there, the future of online learning is difficult for me to
predict. However, I know it has a place
in education, and it is up to us as educators to make sure it is implemented in
a way that continues to facilitate student learning.