How to Teach an Online Course

Whether you’re an experienced educator or teaching an online course for the first time, sharing your knowledge in an online environment is very different from teaching in person. It’s important to get an understanding of how to teach courses online before you launch your new e-learning platform.

Read on to learn how to teach online classes, from course creation and planning to mastering the technology you’ll be using and encouraging interaction between course participants.

Planning your course

Planning course content for an online learning platform is an essential early step in delivering a valuable learning experience. First, make sure that what you plan to teach meets your target audience’s needs. You can do this by using your website analytics to find out which keywords your audience searches before clicking through to your site. That is, what questions does your audience ask that leads them to you? 

Tailor the scope of your course design according to the breadth of user searches. For instance, if some website visitors click through for basic knowledge, but others click through for much more sophisticated and detailed knowledge, you may wish to run an A-Z type course that covers everything the learner needs to know in addition to separate beginner level courses and advanced programs. This way, you’ll have a course to match different intended learning outcomes.

Also, organize your course content into lessons and chapters, so that you don’t try to cover everything in a single class or even within a single course. For instance, a graphic design course provider might break learning down into different modules covering illustration, text layout, and photo retouching.

Finally, make sure your course content is organized clearly on your website. With Squarespace Courses, you can easily organize your content into lessons and chapters and students can keep track of their progress with a progress bar. This will give your students a better experience, helping to build your reputation for quality learning content.

Mastering the technology you’ll be using

Whether you’ll be delivering real-time teaching in front of an audience or teaching an asynchronous course purely via content you’ve prepared in advance, it’s important to get to know the hardware and software you’ll use to deliver your course. This will help to give customers a fluid, high-quality experience at every stage of their learning and whether they’re learning at their own pace or not.

For example:

• Practice recording your voice using a microphone and audio interface to get the best sound quality for your audio learning materials and presentations.

• Test your video hardware in different locations to find the best visual experience. Consider the lighting and background, and whether you need space to demonstrate anything.

• Stress test your internet connection if you’ll be doing any live teaching or meetings with students to avoid disruptions.

• Try viewing your online learning materials to make sure they’re formatted correctly and are easily accessible.

• Offer face-to-face video conferencing if you have a Squarespace site. Acuity users can connect video conferencing to automatically create virtual appointments for your participants.

It’s important to smooth out any glitches in advance so that your users have a positive, issue-free experience with their learning environment from the start.  

Encouraging interaction between learners

Because you’ll be teaching in a virtual environment, online teachers have extra work to do to develop the same kind of peer-to-peer interaction you might experience in a physical classroom. The payoff is that you’ll make your course available to far more people than by running a physical course, so it’s worth the time investment.

The best way to teach online is to engage learners in two-way dialog with your material. Some ways to do this include:

• Encouraging users to leave comments, questions, and likes on your blog posts

• Scheduling problem-solving or discussion groups for assignments to connect course attendees

• Driving customers back to your social media channels and review sites to leave feedback on your course materials, which has the added benefit of developing the reputation of your courses

Interactive learning can often be more effective in engaging students than passive learning. So, while you should definitely take time to develop high-quality student learning materials such as video, audio, and downloadable reading materials, the key to creating a successful online education program is to also give learners the opportunity to communicate with you—and with each other.

Squarespace Courses has the features you need to host all of your online course materials and connect your students in one place.

Learn more about putting together an online course and branding it

This post was updated on August 21, 2023.