In recent times, more and more schools and universities around the world are moving only to online learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers are busy transferring their face-to-face courses to online. Designing online courses takes a lot of time and effort. However, now we need a simpler solution especially for struggling schools.

Here are 14 quick tips from online learning experts to improve your online teaching.

1. Record your lectures, do not broadcast them

If students have Internet poor internet access, they will miss the live conference. Instead, record the video and send it to your students so they can watch during a good time for them.

2. Show your face

Research shows that lecture videos showing teachers' faces are more effective than simple narrative slides. Combine your slides with your own video.

3. Keep the video short

Videos longer than 15 minutes can cause slow download speeds and distract students. If you have more to say, shoot two or three short videos.

4. Test slides

Be sure to test the slides on your smartphone before recording the lecture so that all of the text is visible on the small screen. You can check the font size, color, template layout and screen ratio carefully.

5. Use existing resources

It is unrealistic to expect you to make a high-quality video yourself for a semester. You can use other peoples resources available online and provide students with clickable links and make sure they have open access. Using open resources can help prevent access problems for students. If any of the suggested resources are not available, you will receive an inbox full of student emails and will eventually waste all your time troubleshooting. Take a few more minutes to carefully search for the completely open access materials, and you will not have a headache in the future.

6. Give specific instructions

When you suggest online media longer than 15 minutes, students will not see any content. Instead, suggest the exact part they need (for example, 23:35 to 36:28), as this may even make students more curious. When providing more than two resources, mark them in the order you want students to access them. Simple numbering according to the difficulty or importance of each resource item will be of great help to your students.

7. Set reasonable expectations

When creating a quiz, you need to ensure that all questions can be answered by consulting the provided learning resources. When you ask students to write a summary of the conference video, you should make it clear that this is not a serious report. Make this a required assignment, but a low-risk assignment will produce the best results and student response. A set of 15 test questions or a limit of 300 words is enough for students to participate for 30 minutes.

8. Use group communication with caution

Group communication should not be used for direct teaching. Instead, set up "virtual office hours" in video conferencing tools like Zoom. Just log in at the specified time and wait for the students. Focus on providing social support and check to see if there are any issues that need to be resolved immediately. This is also a good way to gather feedback from students about teaching online. Make the gathering optional and relaxing. There's no need to get frustrated when no one shows up - students are still happy to know that this option is available.

9. Repeat

Online learners don't like frequent changes in their learning style. They are happy to repeat the same structure and activities. Once you find a teaching style that suits you, you can repeat it once a week until you return to class.