6 ways to improve the quality of your teaching-learning.

As more institutions are opening up to the world of online learning, new possibilities are emerging along with new challenges. We have previously written about topics like engaging your students in an online learning environment and assessing student performance in online classes. Following the stream to help teachers adapt to online education, this time we are going to discuss about ensuring quality in online teaching-learning

  1. Accessibility
    Your students should have access to you, the teacher, the course, their study materials, and the necessary information to help them guide their learning. These are all topics related to each other, yet each of them are important on their own. We will discuss more about accessibility to the teacher in the next point.

    Moving on to the next ones, sharing study materials with your students is all the more important in an online classroom. Unlike a physical classroom, students are practically stranded without their course materials. Course content and their own academic-related info helps to build a greater perspective for your students, and that helps to boost engagement and interaction in the long run.
  2. Communication
    Access to the teacher, both during and after the class, is crucial to engage the student. Make sure you have established proper channels of communication for your students to talk with you if and when they need help.

    Communication is obviously the basic element of an online classroom. The teacher should communicate with their students and students should be able to respond. Online classes using video conferencing, discussion forums, mail and message boxes, etc. are the usual tools for communication. But make sure from time-to-time that these are all working properly, and no student is left out. It’s an added advantage if your learning management tool could also help you with push notifications to engage with your students.
  3. Engagement
    As we have mentioned in the introduction, we have previously written an article about boosting student engagement in online classrooms, and there’s no point in repeating what we have already said. You can check it out here.
  4. Teaching techniques
    Bring new teaching techniques into your classroom as a way to improve the quality and to engage students. Fresh approaches like flipped learning, where the student goes through the course content beforehand, and the teacher and students discuss it during the class could be good.

    You can introduce quizzes and debates into the class, which is a proven technique that would improve the interaction by a great deal. There are many learning theories out there, and even more teaching techniques that improve the quality of teaching-learning. It is up to you to experiment and find the right one that fits your class and style the best.
  5. Feedback
    Collecting regular feedback can help you to improve quality. You can redefine your techniques based on feedback, and it would go on as a continuous improvement mechanism. It could be a form in which the students can anonymously write their perspectives, or you could do it more discreetly by analyzing student interactions and performances over a period of time.

    Anyway, it helps to have a proper technology platform that you can leverage to collect the data needed. Learning management platforms like Linways can help you with advanced analytics and insightful student information that can give you feedback.
  6. Assessment
    You can refer to our previous article here for a better insight in assessing the student performances in an online classroom. Based on your assessments, you, as a teacher, or the department can take the necessary steps to ensure students follow throughout the course and achieve the goals they should. Its a continuous process and a very efficient one in online learning since the teacher’s interaction with the student is limited as compared to physical classrooms.

One important thing to remember

We have talked about some effective ways to ensure quality in your online classroom. But unlike a physical classroom, your efforts can only be as effective as the tool you are using. We do not mean to say that your teaching means less, but without a reliable platform to communicate with your students, or assess them, or take feedback, you can only improve so much. So when it comes to quality, make no compromise on the tool/platform you use to manage your online classroom.

It’ll be great if you could combine all these in one platform because that would greatly improve the accessibility for your students. Using learning management platforms like Linways can help you out here. Linways combines all the necessary elements of managing an institution with a very easy-to-implement structure. Beginning with admissions, student enrollment, attendance, live classes, subject planner, online assessments, Outcome-Based Education, report generation, and result publication are all available in one platform. Linways also hosts a variety of communication features like video conferencing, discussion forums, message boxes, push notifications, etc. You can learn more about Linways LMS with a guided tour of the platform here.

A guided tour of Linways LMS

Also published on Medium.

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