Teach Online – 5 secrets you must know

Here go the five secrets to teach online and make your learners just love it.

1. How to capture learner’s attention?

“Husband Computer”  usually takes 5 minutes to process wife’s queries and give an output. If it is a tennis match something like RAFAEL NADAL D. ROGER FEDERER, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7, 2008 WIMBLEDON FINAL, then one should simply forget about the response till the award ceremony is done.

The way sports lovers are captured by the matches of their favorite sport is just hypnotic! (sigh!)

Teaching online can be successful if you know how to capture your learner’s attention until the end. Make your lessons interesting and interactive. Add quizzes, show reference videos from youtube or you can upload one.

Design your lessons in such a way that there is a continuous flow of content. Keep it narrative. Have a link or continuity from one lesson to another.  Form a chain of concepts that they learn. You should probably adapt one of those techniques the mega serial makers use, to capture the attention of our couch potatoes who can sit in front of the television for hours.

 2. How to make lessons easy and simple?

Let me take you through an activity to illustrate how important these focusing techniques are while you teach online. When you are teaching something online, be specific so that you make your learners visualize what you are trying to teach and they will remember your lessons throughout.

Look at the image below.

What was the time shown in the clock?
I am sure you went back and checked the image again for the time.
Now, have a look at the image below. 

This time, before I ask, you know the time.
It is because your focus of attention is on the clock. Nothing in the background to distract. Your eyes looked only at the needles of the clock. Do not overfill your course content with unnecessary details. Come to the point quickly. You will have your learners stick to it.

3. How to make your learners enroll?

Have you seen a woman buying lipstick? They first try it on their hand. In case, the vendor doesn’t have the trial piece of the particular shade, they ask for another shade but never take a chance with a direct fresh piece.

So always have the sample of your course. Like, keep some lessons within your course as a free trial. No matter how resourceful your course is, it goes waste if people don’t enroll and make use of it. So always give a portion of it as a free trial so that learners get a glimpse of it and know that there is something worthwhile.

4. How to make your learners learn faster?

Think of any movie star.
How long did you take to choose one out of so many that you know? Quite a while right?
Now, think of Mission Impossible star.
You thought of Tom Cruise !? Good job, but I feel sorry for other cast and crew! 😉

Belle Beth Cooper in her blog https://blog.bufferapp.com/10-surprising-facts-about-how-our-brain-works says,

When our brains receive new information, it doesn’t necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. When familiar information is processed, this doesn’t take much time at all. New information, however, is a bit slower and makes time feel elongated.

It is always advisable to design your lessons in such a way that the new information in your content is presented with something related to what learners already know. That way you are helping them grasp things faster and so they would love to enroll to your course.

5. How to make learners scale up their performance?

Do you see any recent reality shows? I see most of them. Master Chef, Project Runway, America’s Got Talent, American Idol etc.  Though each show is on a different talent like music, dance, cooking, singing, one common to all of them is their glamorous feedback giving judges with their score cards! They add suspense, bring twists, flash their scorecards, give away their verdict at the end of each performance. It is that feedback time that holds the viewers of the show and bring in more TRPs to the show. It just tells us how important feedbacks are and how influencing they could be on performers. 

Give your learners targeted feedback by pointing out their strength and weaknesses through student analytics. That way help them and you are helping yourself in scaling up your course while scaling up their performance.

I recommend you to also go through this Learnyst blog to know more techniques to teach online that really works.