A strategy is important for starting out any new venture to make it successful. So when you think of starting your online test prep institution then you should have an online teaching strategy at the place. This is like a mixed bag of industry best practices and a few road maps that you are going to follow to make your test prep institution up and running, with more and more learners signing up on your platform.
Why Online Teaching Strategy Is Important
This strategy is also a key distinguishing factor between a good teacher and best teacher. And truth be told, everyone loves the teacher who is not only a subject matter expert but also practices certain principles in life to make the learners’ learning experience worth the time. And when your existing learners love you, chances are high that they will recommend you to their friends.
So to give you the edge over your other competitors, we have compiled a list of 7 practices that you should include in your online teaching strategy. You can incorporate these practices in your online test prep institutions and can see the changes, yourself.
Checkbox 1: Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is the most important aspect of an online teaching strategy. Unless you know who your target audiences are, you can not possibly layout a more sure shot way course marketing and other important parts of online teaching. Think of the imaginary situation, a world-known chef opened a non-veg restaurant in a locality where most of the residents are vegetarian. So, despite being the world-famous cook he will not do better than the local food vendor who sells vegetarian food. Now, though this is just an example, it is something you should think about. If your teaching platform sells more of CAT test preparation course, you can’t start selling GRE test preparation course. Rather, you have to work on bringing out more quality content on CAT test preparation.
Apart from this, knowing your audience can also tap into a test prep segment which has a lesser number of teachers and you can easily bridge the gap. If you know that say GRE test prep segment has lesser number of teachers than the number of GRE aspirants, while CAT test preparation segment has a more balanced ratio. So you can plan your course and bridge the gap of the teachers to learners ratio and attract more learners. And you already know, more the learner, more the revenue.
Checkbox 2: High-Quality Course Material
Now that you have identified your target audience, it is time to create a course material that will easily grab the attention of learners and keep them engaged, so much so, that they would want their friends to join your test prep institutions. So the first thing you have to ensure is that the course material is of really high quality. The content should be informative, to the point and helpful for that specific competitive exam.
You have to use graphic contents and other formats also. Because interactive and comprehensive course materials are more sought after in today’s time. So if you are using images, use a high-quality image. High-quality images easy to understand. Make use of different formats like Powerpoint, video, pdf etc. to make the course material more interactive.
Checkbox 3: Keeping Up a Regular Communication, But Make it Measured
The job of teachers does not end with teaching. A great teacher extends his/her help beyond the time of teaching. Like example, my guitar teacher keeps sending me every new song or playing style that he comes across online and thinks I can implement them to better my playing. Teaching for competitive tests are not different than this. Any new updates or piece of news that you think can help your learners, send those to your learners. This will help you keep them engaged.
But often regular communication emails end up being marked as spam mail. Because you may have sent your learners a little too many emails in a short period of time. So plan out on the emails also, that you will be sending to your learners. A good idea is to send not more than 2-3 emails to your learners and keep them as much helpful and informative as possible.
Checkbox 4: Prepare Discussion Post
How rude your teacher seemed to you when s/he didn’t clear your doubt? You may have left with no choice to consult other teachers. And if it was test prep institution, you might have thought of leaving the institution, as well. So as part of the online teaching strategy, it is adisable to allow a space on your teaching platform where the learners can discuss their problem and you can answer all those queries. This will not only make the subject matter easy for them, this will also make you a great teacher in their eyes.
So allow learners to discuss their doubt on the discussion forum. And you might see some of their doubts are getting cleared by other learners as well. So it is a win win situation for you and your learners.
Checkbox 5: Thoughtful and Regular Feedback
Discussion post is not the end of it. Once your learners start posting their doubts on, you have to regularly answer their doubts and make the learning experience the best they can think of. A regular feedback indicates how serious you are about teaching and also that you love your learners. So instead of keeping the doubts in the discussion forum pending, answer them in ways so that it doesn’t ask for another explanation and make giving feedback a regular habit.
Checkbox 6: Help Learners Track Their Progress
One main aspect of online teaching strategy is to help learners track their progress. Especially last few months before the final test are crucial and the only concern of the learners is improving as much as they can. And improvement can only be tracked by tracking their progress compared to other learners. So as a test prep teacher it is also important for you to assess your learners with utmost accuracy and provide them with proper feedback including their progress report.
Checkbox 7: Keep Students Engaged And Motivated
Every great teacher in present time and past time have one thing in common. They are very good motivator and they know how to keep their student engaged all the time. Motivating is one very important aspect of teaching for test preparation. The motivated a learner is the better his/her score will be. And to motivate them, you have to keep them engaged to the course for most of the time, if not all the time. Sharing important information or some daily task is a good way to keep them engaged. And some inspirational speech from your side is one of the easiest ways to motivate them. Mix with it, your personal involvement with the learners. This is a sure shot way to fire up the motivation in them.
Using Learnyst to Ease Your Task
Now if you are wondering how to manage all of the online teaching strategy while creating awesome content at the same time, you can think of checking out the Learnyst LMS platform for your first online test prep institution. Learnyst has proactively integrated all the important features that you need to engage your learners. Here are few key highlights of Learnyst platform.
- Homegrown sales analytics. This helps you in understanding your audience and create courses according to the learners’ need.
- Options to create course content in different formats allows you to create the most interactive course content.
- Integration of Amazon SES offers you the option to send daily communication emails to all your learners at the touch of a finger.
- Learner discussion board allows your learners to post their doubts and queries on the course itself. And you can view and answer all their doubts.
- State of art student analytics gives you the option to send detailed progress report and test report to your learners. Upon completion of a test, they can view it onscreen and self-evaluate their progress.
- Post news feed, MCQ newsfeed, and push notification allow you to engage your learners on a daily basis.
And also read tools which are essentials teaching online.
So if you haven’t checked out Learnyst yet you can check it out here today.