Articles

WHAT MAKES A GREAT ONLINE TEACHER?

Online teaching strategies are, at their core, much like brick and mortar strategies: the central objective is for a teacher to impart content knowledge to students. Teachers accomplish this through engaging and inspiring students, through communicating their expert knowledge, but beyond that, and perhaps flute importantly, through sharing their passion for the subject and its relevance to students’ lives. If education is productive, students are finally confronted with themselves — their innermost thoughts, their belief systems, their moral values, and their aesthetic values.

Teaching inspires a journey: it should he an authentic experience. The fear with online learning is that the experience is two-dimensional and not three. This is a common misconception. The student in the virtual world is still on a journey — in some cases it will be largely self—guided and in other cases teacher-directed. In the online environment, dialogues can be conducted across centuries, across oceans — and through infinite cyberspace — and all in the immediate moment through Internet connectivity. This is the 21st century environment. It represents the chaotic energy of fast-paced access to information (not of all it credible, of course) that we need to help students navigate, providing them with critical thinking skills to discriminate among sources of information.