How to Teach Online

This Weeks Objective: Decide how you will “build rapport” with your distance learners.

You don’t teach a class. You teach a student. Connecting to students and ”building rapport” is a crucial element of teaching for the best online teachers. Highly effective online teachers have a strong trust in students. They believe students want to learn and know they can learn until proven otherwise.

In What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain (2004) discusses some of the major ways that teachers can connect with students through the practices of effective teaching. Below is a list of suggestions to help you connect with your students.

• Spend time online with students to nurture their learning.
• Invest in your students by not fostering a feeling of power over them.
• Have the attitude that, “There is no such thing as a stupid question.”
• Create an online environment where everyone can contribute and each contribution is unique.
• Foster the feeling that teachers are fellow students and human beings struggling with mysteries of the universe.
• Provide task praise (you did that well) and avoid person praise (you are so smart.)
• Give students as much control as possible over their learning.
• Provide lots of non-judgmental feedback.
• Encourage collaboration and cooperation.
• Provide many opportunities to revise and improve work.
• Avoid language of demands and promises.
• Make a promise to your students that you will try to help each one achieve as much as possible.
• Understand your students’ ambitions.

So how do teachers close the “distance” gap and build rapport?

Rapport in Distance Education provides insights into the importance of rapport in DE as well as challenges to and indicators of rapport-building in DE. The study relied on interviews with 42 Canadian high school DE teachers. The authors identified six categories of rapport-building in DE. Please click on each links below for a list of indicators.

• Recognizing the person/individual
• Supporting and monitoring
• Availability, accessibility and responsiveness
• Non-text-based interactions
• Tone of interactions
• Non-academic conversation/interactions

Assignment

1. Complete your Week 2: Decide how you will “build rapport” with your distance learners plan.

Comment on your peers plans in their Google document by using the criteria below.

• How does your comment contribute in meaningful ways to further make
  sense their plan?
• Does your comment add insight? Did you take something from the plan and relate it to readings, resources, or from what someone else has said, and analyzes it?
• Or does your comment make a criticism, an observation an
  interpretation, or draw a conclusion?
• Or you can ask a question that proposes answers. The good question asks “why” and “how” and demonstrates you have thought about, and have done some research, on the question. Answers are proposed and asked for feedback.