So, you finally decided that you have some valuable knowledge that you want to bring to the Internet community, but you don’t know where to begin. A lot of people have become “experts” in their own specialized field, and have knowledge that they want to share and don’t know how you can.
9 Easy steps to Becoming an Online Teacher
1. Choose Your Topic and make sure your are an expert
You probably already have a subject in mind. Regardless of topic, make sure that you have a top-notch understanding of what it is. If it is accounting, and doing personal tax treatments, make sure that you understand all the ins-and-outs of tax preparation a course in miracles podcast, so that your students will get high value from your course. Do you need to know absolutely every personal tax question that arises? No, but be sure that you have the answers to 99% of them. If you aren’t an expert, it will show through in your course materials, and as you teach your online course, and will result in poor sales.
2. Create Your Learning Materials
Next you need to get this Expert knowledge in a format that you can teach your students. Here are a few formats that you can use.
Video
Videos allow you to show a more personal side of teaching. It has more of an in-class type of feel, then straight audio or PowerPoint. You don’t need a Recording studio to do video. It just needs to be a nice clean place that doesn’t have a lot of distractions. It could be in your office, or backyard. Just make sure that it is fairly quiet apart from you speaking. No phones calling, kids crying and moping or cars honking in the background. Be sure to use a tripod, so that the image is as stable. Most people don’t like to be in front of the camera, but only be yourself and share your knowledge. With video is that you can always re-record if it didn’t work out. I would recommend using a modern video camera (last 3 years) that allows you to easily export to your computer. If you have a nice beginning and end to each video, then you can just use your raw video. To make it more professional you can use video editing software that allow you to add titles and text to your video. An application could be one long video, but marketing and advertising to break it into smaller videos, so students can take the course over time. You can also intersperse the video with images from PowerPoint or do a screencast, where you do a demonstration on your computer screen.
PowerPoint
Having a good PowerPoint presentation can be an effective learning tool. It allows for visuals and text to be combined to illustrate principles being taught. It can be augmented with some nice transitions, but be sure not to overuse them as too many can almost become distracting. A PowerPoint presentation ican use for an online course, as well as if you are teaching to a live group of students or vice versa. If your PowerPoint does have either Video or Audio embedded, you should remove them, and creating separate materials for them, to decrease the size of the PowerPoint file.
Pdfs
For all text documents with some images, creating a PDF is the best option. Most text editors including Microsoft Word allow you to export your document to a PDF. Using PDF is the best option as the vast majority of Internet users can open and read a PDF. Even if your course is a predominantly a video focused course, it might be good to have some notes, visuals, etc. in Pdfs so that enrollees that like to read can have some of this important material in reading format as well as video.
Audio
If video is not an option, a simpler but still effective format can be audio. Be sure that your audio is clear and free of any distracting industrial noise. There are a number of good audio recording computer applications you can use to record and edit the audio right on your computer. Be sure to your website clear introduction as well ending to each audio clip. Your audio can also reference Pdfs or PowerPoints that you have created for your course, to allow the learner to have some visuals to complement the audio.
3. Create Some Test or Assessments
Though not an absolute requirement for most courses, a test or quiz to review materials which are covered is always a good idea. Some courses it will be a requirement to pass a chapter before requiring you to continue on to the next chapter. Typically online courses have multiple-choice questions so that it can be automatically graded and the student will know immediately whether or not they have passed or failed. To manufacture a quiz go through your material, and pick out the most important facts, concepts, etc. you want your students to learn. From these, then create a multiple-choice question that will determine whether the student has understood the concept or not. Finally, you will have to choose a passing grade in order for students to advance to the next chapter. Typically this is 50% but may be higher if it is important to you that the students get the concepts covered.
4. Organize Your content
Now that you have raw learning materials and some tests written, you will need to organize all the work into chapters. Each chapter may just have one or various types of learning materials within the chapter. Each chapter should have a title as well as a description about the content covered in the chapter. Some programs may allow you to have an guide video for each chapter to clarify what is to be covered in the material. After organizing the chapters, and creating descriptions for each chapter, you need to think about a description about the whole course. This description should describe not only the content that is in the course, but what type of learner would take the course, and what the course prepares the learner for. An accurate, succinct description will go a long way in assisting to promote your course.
5. Find an appropriate LMS
Once you have all of your learning material together and organized, you now need to find an appropriate Learning Management System that will meet your needs. There are literally hundreds of different possible solutions for LMSes. Instead of selecting specific solutions, we will go over some things to consider in choosing an LMS. Then i will show the solution Learnopia Inc. has to offer, and show how it is the best solution for many teachers.
Functionality
Things to look at is what kind of functions you want, and is the LMS that you are considering have these features, and are they easy to use. There is not point in getting a large full-featured LMS, if you only require the ability to show videos, and have multiple-choice tests. So, you need to look at your current courses and decide what are absolute must-have functionality, and then check LMS to see if they not only have these functions, but they are easy to use.
Business or Accounting Requirements
Depending on your application, you should look to make sure that the LMS will fulfill your business and accounting requirements. If you are looking to charge for your courses, of course your LMS should be able to take credit card transactions. If you need some accounting features to help do your books, then be sure these are also included.
User Base
You need to understand your user base to figure out what LMS you need. Are preparing to give your courses away to the public or are you going to charge for them? Are your courses for internal training of employees or proper in the public to see. These important factors need to be considered when choosing your LMS. Licensed versus Hosted
There is a big difference between having an LMS that is hosted for you, or purchasing an LMS license and hosting it on your own server. The hosted solution takes a lot of the hassle out of setting up an LMS. An hosting company will set up LMS and get you on your way. You pay a monthly fee, but they cover hosting as well as technical support for this fee. In the licensed version, you may responsible for setting up the appliance on your server. If you don’t have a web hosting service company, you will need to go out and now research web host firms to decide which one works for your application.