How To Become Online Teacher

If you’ve been teaching for years in traditional schools, it might be a challenge to retain your talent during the unstable times of COVID-19 pandemic and political vulnerability. Luckily, there is an efficient option available for maintaining your teaching credentials and making decent money even as a side hustle with teaching online on eLearning platforms. Despite the fact that the global economy is experiencing a downfall, lots of industries, professionals, and just regular people still need valuable information regarding jobs, new skills, science, or consultation from experts.

Online teaching is one of the most potentially promising professions that the future has to offer. Teaching online nearly promises unlimited tutoring or spreading knowledge on a global scale with online courses and 1-1 online consultations. Sure, some think that the conventional approaches in teaching might be the best. However, one can’t deny endless examples of tremendous success with teaching online, selling online courses, and providing expertise on online learning platforms. Obviously, online teaching won’t displace traditional teaching, but the predictions are that it will certainly gain more popularity in the next decade.

Get into more detailed information on the online teaching system with this blog post and learn how to become an in-demand online teacher in 2020. Keep on reading and you’ll find some useful info or, at least, feel the sting of motivation to build your own online course.

What does an online teacher do?

One particular benefit or affordance of learning online instead of face to face becomes obvious if you read posted responses from students. No secret, thousands, if not millions, have successfully gone through online classes. Lots of people shifted towards online education just recently, but the amount of positive feedback definitely exceeds negative experiences. Let’s talk about what online teachers do and how they approach the online educational system.

In online classes, some teachers use cloud technologies (or shared Google documents) to enable students to engage in crowdsourcing activities where they all work and pool together their collective knowledge and intelligence to collaboratively build a single artifact (like a job aid, infographic, FAQs). This process provides students with the opportunity to research, compile, organize, formulate, synthesize, evaluate, review, discuss, revise, and apply what they are studying into something of value.

To have 30+ students (or even more) in a face to face classroom trying to make their individual contributions all at the same time in one classroom whiteboard or flipchart would be rather difficult. This has to do with given constraints in-classroom time and space. Crowdsourcing is made possible online because students have more time to make their individual contributions. 

Being time-independent allows students to work on the same task simultaneously at the same time (crowdsourcing). But yet not have too many students working at the same time without overcrowding the space. This is achieved through activities being set up asynchronously and spread over a 7 day period. So, there is less chance of having two students posting simultaneously, conflicting, or making redundant posts.

For example, online teachers provide students with a shared Google spreadsheet, document, or presentation slide to collaboratively compile, synthesize, and organize the critical ideas or information into a job aid (such as flowcharts, matrix) that they can use in the future to help them apply what they study in class to successfully perform a given task.

Some teachers provide a list of ideas on ways to contribute to the shared document. Then introduce essential steps to be taken in a procedure like adding a hyperlink to a video, re-positioning nodes to organize them into groups, or into a temporal sequence. This can involve attaching sidebar comments to a node to share and discuss comments and suggestions or to share personal stories to illustrate or explain the node. Students are then required to make a minimum number of contributions to earn the assigned number of participation points for completing the activity.

In most cases, online students formulate and post a list of discussion questions in a shared Google document and then instruct students to post a reply to a question or to another student’s posting by inserting a line break immediately after the posting and typing CTRL+] to indent and left justify the reply below the posting. To see the newest posts, students click on the link “Latest edits…” link located at the top of the Google document.

Or, you can record a simple macro in a shared Google spreadsheet in less than two minutes to create a keyboard shortcut for posting threaded replies that are:

• indented beneath a message;
• displayed with date and time of posting;
• locked/protected so that other students cannot edit or delete a student’s posting.

The instructor can insert comments or notes within a cell containing a student’s posting to provide commentary or meta discussions. Host one online group discussion per worksheet within a Google spreadsheet and download all the discussions into a single Excel file for archival and for future reference.

Also, in an online class, students can self-report in a weekly quiz which activities they completed after performing the minimum requirements stated within each activity. The total participation accounts for 20% of the course grade.

Who is the best online teacher

Every profession has its own path and style to grasp the best quality and aftermath success. The quality and style of teaching depend much on a good teacher. So, the teaching style is something that defines the attitude. In the online classroom, a teacher gets hardly enough time for normal conversations with each student. As a teacher knows the pressure of the syllabus, and she/he has to complete it too. An online teacher can arrange interactive sessions after the end of every online session that gives much scope of communication. Students will get involved in it enthusiastically if they feel free, fearless before their respected teachers. However, if a teacher has not any good qualities of knowledge, then what is the use of such an attitude especially in an online classroom.

Here is a list of skills and attributes that make an outstanding online teacher. Give it a read and make notes:

• Since online teachers need to speak to the audience all the time, your voice needs to sound nice and pleasant. This contributes to the ability to speak clearly and audibly. A good online teacher learns how to modulate voice and uses this skill where it is necessary to deliver a strong effect.
• Must not lecture students with just reading the lecture notes. Students much more appreciate valuable information which is not taken from the same tutorials they study with.
• Good online teachers must have the ability to speak fluently devoid of pet–hate terms such as: “you know” or “you know what I mean”.
• Has the ability to explain difficult materials clearly and succinctly. A good online teacher avoids over-used or technical jargon – if used, must explain the meanings and relevance.
• Must be enthusiastic and in complete command of the subject he/she teaches. 
• Should have the ability to make the subject taught applicable to the real world.
• Has the ability to make online lessons come alive and keep students motivated wanting to learn more.
• Has the ability to use examples and simple diagrams/graphics to explain difficult concepts, making them easy to understand and remember.
• Has the ability to use good clean jokes sometime to remove the drudgery of some lecture sessions.
• Has the ability to understand students‘ learning ability and be willing to make adjustments to suit the students’ learning when required.
• Does not use sarcastic remarks or make remarks to embarrass students.
• Does not bring their own frustration or personal problems to the classroom.
• Well–mannered, pleasant demeanor which makes students feel at ease. Students much better learn online when they feel that the teacher is approachable.

As you can see from everything mentioned above, neither the attitude nor the knowledge, as well as teaching style and quality can do alone anything best for a good online teacher. When all qualities come and work together hand in hand, then the satisfaction of teaching can sing the victory of a successful teacher. Also, a successful online teacher not necessarily has to be financially rich, but the best online teacher must be intellectually rich for sure. In other words, the best online teacher will truly understand the pulse of the students and lead them on the path to success.

How to become a full-time online teacher

There are about three major requirements for those who want to become full-time online instructors. What are they?

#1. Love the content you teach. Develop techniques and strategies for helping others learn about the subject you talk about in your online lectures or courses. They will also feed off of your enthusiasm.

#2. Love students you teach and let them know that you care. If you love them you will want to be the best teacher you can, so you will do what it takes to confirm this.

#3. Be able to own the audience. It doesn’t mean that you have to behave like a tyrant, but when necessary you can demonstrate that you want to be in control. Every lesson that you teach (and this could be in mathematics, or science, or history) has to be given with a purpose. A good teacher will incorporate their own purpose into what they are teaching, mixing online sessions with academic teachings.

Another important thing is that instructors conducting online classes should be open to changes in deadlines in exceptional cases. This strategy also helps in making the students succeed. Using the flexibility of online platforms as an advantage, this benefit should be given to the students too. Since online classes are different from typical brick and mortar set up, it is a great idea to ask the students to lead discussions. This way the students get engaged in intensive research and hold themselves more accountable for the learning.

Additionally, while conducting an online class, a teacher should be capable enough to handle technical glitches that can hamper the student’s learning. If for most colleges and universities online classes require only a computer and Internet access. Online instructors, who teach on eLearning platforms, often organize live sessions (like webinars), so the gear is essential like a headset or microphone.

If you are creating your own courses for Grinfer or another site, then you’ll need a camera. Speaking from the experience of other full-time online teachers, an external microphone is a better option than built-in microphones. There is an option where you can record voice-over PowerPoint as an easy way to create a video.

Once you become an online teacher full time, remember, an online teacher is a messenger in a way, so convey your knowledge with your perspectives. It is important that you’ll provide online students with the impression that they are learning from the original source. So, again, the teacher, who teaches online full time, must have a great understanding of the subject, covering all the aspects. At the same time, you should be someone who can be trusted, someone to learn passionately comfortably from. These aspects will contribute to your success as a full-time online teacher.

How to get a job as an online teacher

Online teaching, these days, has become a wonderful career opportunity for qualified professionals and experts who want to try it for a full-time job. There are quite a few online teaching options wherein you can pick and choose your subject of interest to teaching and also the convenient timings and hours you can dedicate for them. 

If you decided to donate your time and effort to online teaching full time, opt for a career on the Grinfer online learning platform! Here are some simple steps for launching your full-time online teaching career with Grinfer:

• Go to Grinfer’s blog and watch a video tutorial with step-by-step instructions on how to build an online course on the Grinfer’s marketplace.
• Register and start building your course with some simple steps (no membership fees, no other fees, everything is free!)
• Be a part of the Grinfer’s teaching community along with such best-selling instructors like Rob Percival, Brian Bozarth, Sorin Constantin, Laurence Svekis, and others, who have a proven record of thousands of students enrolled in their courses.
• No set fees for the promotion of your course on the Internet later, once your course will be posted on the platform.
• Try an option of face-to-face video sessions with 1-1 consultations that are available to any experts regardless of whether they have any online courses built or not.

Bottom Line

If you want to become a full-time online teacher, contact Grinfer’s marketing team for more information. Grinfer’s staff is very good at providing feedback and giving out useful tips on how to improve your courses for selling them better and faster. Once you sell a course on Grinfer, you’ll receive an author’s commission. Also, try our affiliate program to make more cash for a side hustle.

Just keep in mind that Grinfer requires all the information that you provide for your course to be authentic. In other words, plagiarism is definitely not appreciated and won’t be accepted. All the information that you provide will go through the process of moderation. This usually takes not more than 24 hours. So, once you create authentic online content for courses on topics that you already know – you will be all set and ready to sell courses online with Grinfer!