Online vs Face-to-Face
Although you will need to develop new skills when teaching online for the first time,
it is still teaching. Your first course will usually be "wanting," but the experience
gets better with each successive course. Communication is the biggest change. It can
be intense and frequent. Contrary to expectation, you will often get to know your
online students much better than their on-site counterparts.
Changes for Instructors:
-
You become part teacher, part proctor, part technician, part designer/developer
- Increased workload (excessive at first - later revisions require about 10% more work than a F2F course)
- Amplified communication (with more student problems - both technical and personal)
- Communication without body language, voice tone, facial expressions, though online conferencing can help with this
- Greater time commitment - as students expect 24/7 contact (but the trade off is at-home convenience and flexibility)
Changes for Students:
- More independent, self-motivated, self-initiated learning
-
Become active learners (assuming responsibility for their own success)
- Need to develop good time-management skills
- Less emphasis on attendance, more on performance
Changes in Teaching:
- Visualization with a greater variety of techniques
- More passive - emphasis on facilitation
- Less giving of information, more guiding of learning
- More frequent and varied student assessments
- Need to account for differences in student tech ability
- Discovery of new types of content, new links for help
- New solutions to old problems
- More diverse population
Moving from Teacher Centered teaching
.... To Student-Centered Teaching