Online teaching is a modern way to share your professional expertise. Today you can give the lessons to the students from all over the world.

If you want to become the best online teacher ever, you should create the informative course materials to engage your target audience and to improve the learning process. Your work will be efficient, if you follow these 5 simple principles.

1. Craft compelling content

As a teacher, you should provide your students with unique information. Don’t try to copy content from any popular sources; you should write everything from the scratch. You should create a valuable offer – an exclusive content, which will help your students to acquire new knowledge in the most productive way.

If you don’t know where to start, you can take a look at other teachers, who succeed in your field. Try to analyze, what kind of content they offer and what features make it special. Best practices should inspire you to implement your own brilliant ideas.

However, you should never ever try to imitate someone else’s teaching style and never steal content written by others. You are a unique individual with a bright personality and you have a vast amount of knowledge. Consequently, you have a great chance to become an outstanding online teacher without outside help.

2. Keep it simple and understandable

Your job requires presenting even sophisticated ideas in simple words. If you work with the newbies, who start acquiring basic knowledge, don’t overuse the scientific terms and subject-specific vocabulary. Otherwise, your students will think that you give a lesson in an incomprehensible foreign language.

A structure of your lessons also should be simple, so try to divide a huge block of information into the smaller pieces. For example, if you are a guitar teacher, don’t force your new client to learn a whole song in an hour. You should demonstrate two basic chords and one scale, and that would be enough.

If you work with the foreign students, make sure that they can clearly understand content of every lesson. You can translate your course materials to ensure that language barrier will not become a hindrance for effective teaching. Find the experts, which will help you to translate not only text documents, but also PowerPoint presentations and videos.

You can check PickWriters to look through a translation agencies list. This website compares services by 3 parameters: quality, price and delivery. You can read the customers’ reviews and choose an agency, which you can trust fully.

3. Use visual engaging elements

It’s a well-known fact that 90% of all information, which is transmitted to the humans’ brain, is received from the eyes. For this reason, people find it easier to acquire fresh knowledge using visual content.

Obviously, text should remain a core element of your course materials, but you should diversify it with visual elements. No matter what you teach people to do: bake cakes, write books or design websites – you should always use relevant photos, screenshots, infographics and videos.

Don’t be afraid to learn something new, there are a lot of tools and services, which can help you to create catchy graphic design:

• Camtasia. This is a screen recorder and video editor, which has a user-friendly design and extensive toolkit. Using Camtasia, you can manage the video files like a pro.
• ShutterStock. This resource offers free and paid images, photos and vectors. When you use them, you can be sure that you don’t infringe someone else’s’ copyright.
• Canva. This is a one of the most popular online services, which provides templates for infographics and posters. You can create visual content with fantastic design, even if you have never done it before.
• Screenshot Captor. This is a simple, but very useful tool, which helps to capture a particular area of the screen and edit it in various ways. You can apply frames, borders, shadow and blurring and other effects.

4. Add interactive content

Students get bored with an ordinary way of teaching, so you need to offer something brand new. The entertaining quizzes and drag-and-drop puzzles can be the great solutions. If you are able to create the simulated job performance exercises, that would be even better.

Clients try to avoid teachers with a classic approach to education, which kills the creativity. Students are really interested in online courses, which offer them new interactive method of the fast and effective learning. Generations Y and Z want to get the best results in a shortest period of time.

Interactivity is a beneficial because it boosts engagement and improves knowledge retention. Also it helps to keep students motivated, so they don’t give up learning after the few first classes.

5. Track the time.

When you develop an online course, you should divide all learning materials into few learning modules. The duration of all modules must be the same. It’s much easier to understand complex topics, when teacher breaks it into few smaller subtopics.

Every lesson should last from 40 to 60 minutes, because students cannot stay focused for longer. When one module takes more than an hour, client starts losing an interest to the subject.

Keep in mind that modern people are very busy, so you should respect time of your clients. You should be punctual and ask your students to be punctual as well. It’s your responsibility to start lesson at appointed time.

Working with foreign students, you should schedule your lessons wisely. If you and your client live in different time zones, try to find an hour, which is suitable for both of you. Also you shouldn’t forget about the daylight saving time changes and adjust your timetable, when necessary.

Final Thoughts

Online teaching is a great job, which can bring you joy, money and benefits. If you want to achieve success in this field, you should analyze preferences of your target audience and develop great engaging course materials.

Now you know how to apply 5 useful principles of effective online teaching to your practice. There is no doubt, your students will appreciate your efforts and will provide you with the positive feedback, which is a priceless reward for any master in the world.