First Time Online Educator

The following is a guest blog post by Keagan Castro. One of the courses Keagan teaches is online Psychology. In this post, Keagan shares a few thoughts about her first online teaching experience. You may follow Keagan on Twitter, @KeaganCastro.

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Hi, and welcome to my first blog post.  Although I have taught for a few years, this is the first time I am teaching an online high school course. I am teaching a one-semester Psychology class to juniors and seniors from three neighboring school districts. I was a bit skeptical at first, but after taking 18 online graduate courses through a variety of institutions, I began to see the increasing significance of learning online. To provide you with some insight, I will give you a brief summary of my experience developing and teaching this course.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to be the educator assigned to create the curriculum for our consortium’s first Psychology course. Building the curriculum was time-consuming, but easy to navigate and organize. My experience taking online graduate courses helped me to recognize a few important things about teaching my first online course.

1. The learner must be self-motivated and time-oriented.
2. The learner must take on the responsibility of learning the content on their own. For example, the learner may need to read from a textbook, listen to a lecture, or research a topic to identify and learn the required content.
3. There should be a routine for each module that is slightly modified based on the content.
4. If the student struggles with the original lesson, the educator must provide the learner with detailed feedback and supplemental materials such as slideshows, videos, and further readings.
5. The course had to give opportunities for students to discuss the content in an organized setting with a topic. These should vary to decrease repetition and boredom. Students may respond to an article or video, create a story, share an experience, etc.
6. The educator must check for understanding using formative assessments as the learner moves through the module to catch any misinformation before the summative assessment.
7. The summative assessments should not be multiple choice tests. They must be project-based assessments where students provide significant evidence of their learning.

After completing the curriculum development, it was time to play school. I only have 12 students in the course, and I’m grateful for that so I can test the waters. I’ve made numerous revisions to the content and provided two survey opportunities for students to offer me feedback on the routine and expectations of coursework. Stay tuned for my next post, when I sort through the challenges of the semester and revisions that were necessary to improve the course.