Read-only if you are a trainer, educator, and teacher who is making a multi-million dollar or believes in making it for your students and yourself with the value of your teachings.

So you are a trainer and educator who has been doing on-stage and online teaching for a while now, you know how difficult it is to scale up the online student subscriptions. If you have taken your own online teaching program and have said to yourself “I am better than this when I am with my students”, then this piece of information will be helpful to you.

How would you have chosen an online teaching platform a few years ago?

Only a few years back you were looking for the best online teaching platform to start going online. Following is what you might have taken your decision based on:

  1. How quick it is to create a course for a non-technology person like you
  2. How quick and easy it is to deliver the self-paced program and bill the students
  3. How simple it was for you to get your own subdomain URL to your teaching programs
  4. How easy it is to send communications, reminders using emails, messages to your online students
  5. How easy it is for you to get the reports
expertise

Hygiene factors for online learning

If you take a closer look at these 5 parameters, they are all creating value around the inherent technology fears of the educators, and yes these fears were super relevant at least about 5 to 7 years back. Most of these parameters revolve around ease of use, because the technology was an overwhelming field for most of the teachers, trainers. If you have a teaching lineage then it likely that you have been prescribed your current platform of online teaching by your teacher because they could use it quickly sometime in history.

How are things different for online teaching in 2019?

User-friendliness has hit the next stage as we enter into 2019, it is now given that even an 8-year-old (or 88 years olds) should be able to create their own online course and teach something. So in 2019, the aforementioned 5 parameters around the ease of use and content delivery are not something for which you pay the money to an online teaching platform. Sales and marketing feature is a type of hygiene today that every platform must have albeit in the context of teaching. The real value for money is in delivering world-class learning experiences for an online teacher today.

5 Capabilities That Deliver Best Online Learning Experience

Most advanced educators and trainers know about the importance of context-setting in a teaching environment. Therefore if you are conducting your in-person session you would choose the physical setting that serves you and your students the best, such as a classroom, a theatrical setting, etc. When it comes to online you are being asked by your online platforms to give up on the environment consistency because the platform doesn’t support it. So here are 5 important capabilities that you must look for as a teacher:

Adaptive Program Design

Linear teaching programs are a typical way in which traditional (industrial era) schools teach their students. If your platform is restricting you from being able to adapt to the learners’ pace then you are not in a position to deliver your best learning experience to everyone. Adaptive designing is as simple as designing a linear program though you can choose to create learning interventions such as asking questions, sharing a story etc. Followed by the learning intervention, every learner may be routed into a different piece of content based on their responses. This is very critical to assess how are the audiences doing in terms of their ability to learn what has been delivered so far. Every individual is unique and therefore adaptability in terms of learners’ pace and capability becomes an extremely critical feature for an online teaching platform. Lack of adaptability to the learners’ pace and capabilities is the key reason why everything that is teachable isn’t learnable with online teaching platforms.

adaptive

Multi-Teaching Environment Support

If you are an established trainer or the one who is getting ready to be one, then you sure have a funnel of your programs. Starting with self-paced programs, upselling into group live programs and upselling into 1 to 1 live mentoring. For each of these formats, you are more likely to use different teaching mediums because your current online teaching platform doesn’t support all these formats (mostly it is supporting self-paced) within the logged in section of your student. Where does this situation tie-up into? Firstly, you need a production manager to handle multiple channels of teaching or you have to put your own precious time into doing so. Secondly, you have to learn other channels where you can host formats such as Group Live and 1 to 1 mentoring. Thirdly, your reporting dashboard cant capture the data points from these other channels because it has a blind eye to what you did outside the online teaching platform.

You know 1 student of 1 to 1 mentoring can make you exactly the same amount of money as your 1-week self-paced program did right? So getting all the formats of teaching under one online teaching platform is the key to delivering amazing learning experience.

E-learning is all about choosing the right teaching format that fits the learning needs

Learning Groups

When you have multiple people learning the same topic what do you do if you are in a room? You might ask them to create smaller groups within them and ask them to work on a quick group assignment like sharing their thoughts, coming up with an answer to your question etc. Now have you been able to replicate this effect in your online teaching platform so far? Chances are that you haven’t been able to do so, because most platforms were designed to mesmerize you into getting online, and they lack the basic functions of a teacher. Look for the capability to build learning cohorts and their ability to work independently within groups online during the session. For my skeptic friends, this isn’t good to have, because your students know how you teach offline and if they simply can’t get that effect online, they will move on.

team

Collaborative learning is crucial for a superior learning experience

Integrated Simulation Environment

If you are teaching technical topics this is very straight forward for you. Your online students get to try out a specific topic you taught right there inside the logged in the section under a simulator. But can you do this with your current platform? Maybe not, because you were told that the students can use their own simulation environment. When students use their own simulation environments you are losing important data points around who is facing what challenge when they tried it out. If you are not a technology trainer then this could be similar to the exercise sheets that you would otherwise circulate in a physical room setting. You get to have data from sheets of the students to analyze and assess the learning experience for students overall and also be able to respond to individual queries by quickly referring to their simulation sheets. So ask for the integrated simulation environment inside the logged in the section for driving a better learning experience for your students from an online teaching platform.

Gratification with Certificates

Any kind of gratification works the best for the learner as a motivation to keep practicing and get better at what they just learned. Most traditional online teaching platforms do not have capabilities to openly gratify the students who completed a course online. Certificates, e-giveaways, stickers etc. are great ways to engage your learners at the end of the course. This is another way learners associate the value for money since they can flash their certificates in their social channels, which may mean more free marketing for you.

These parameters existed in the teaching world for the longest amount of time. Most of this is well taken care of in the physical world of teaching and not in the online teaching realm as much. Having seen most trainers and educators highly successful offline and not as much impactful online marks the importance of delivering a mesmerizing online learning experience today.

Self-Promotion: EdisonLMS has been built keeping these principles of online teaching in mind. Talk to us today to help us learn your specific online teaching needs.

Author
Deepak Murugaian
CEO & Founder
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