Moving from a face-to-face environment to a fully online environment can be intimidating and challenging. You might relate with Dr. Smith, an expert in the discipline, who feels clueless about how to ensure learning happens online. You may also relate to Dr. Mendoza, an enthusiastic instructor who finds it difficult to engage her students and adapt her teaching style in an online learning environment.

What are some other challenges for teaching successful online courses? This page presents other challenges as well as opportunities. These opportunities can be turned into benefits for instructors who can take advantage of them, and meet students' learning needs while they design and deliver quality online instruction.

What are some other challenges for teaching successful online courses?

CHALLENGE
Changing role of instructor

Think about a face-to-face class that involves interacting in real-time with students who are physically in front of you. The instructor invests time preparing for the fifty-minute live lecture. During the class, the students listen to the delivery of content from the instructor. The instructor also periodically asks questions to check students’ understanding, as well as leads discussions that help students form a deeper understanding of concepts. In this example, the faculty role is more like a “distributor of knowledge.”

Experts in online teaching and learning have repeatedly discussed that instructors have a new role to fulfill in an online learning environment. How does the new role differ in a face-to-face class? Let’s think about moving the face-to-face class online. Rather than preparing fifty-minute lectures, the instructor prepares recorded mini-lectures and readings, prepares facilitation and community building experience, monitors online discussions, manages student interaction, and guides students’ learning during the process. The instructor encourages the students to actively engage with fellow students. The students immerse themselves in materials and co-construct their knowledge base through back-and-forth exchanges among the students and the instructor. In this example, the faculty role is more like a “facilitator of learning.”

OPPORTUNITY The role change for instructors as an opportunity to stimulate students to actively participate in learning and to facilitate interactions between students and their peers. Instructions are changed to a student-centered approach.

CHALLENGE
Transitioning from face-to-face to online

The challenge also includes effectively transferring what is taught in the face-to-face class to the online environment. In an online course, the class activities are primarily asynchronous—instructors prepare activities for students in advance of students’ access, and students complete their work on their own time within given deadlines. In a face-to-face class, the class activities are synchronous—instructors and students gather in real-time since the class activities take place at specific hours. Online courses require instructors to do more planning before the course gets started, because the course content and plans for student interaction, activities, and assessment ideally should all be developed before the semester starts.

OPPORTUNITY Planning an online course ahead of time provides an opportunity for faculty to envision the whole course from a "big picture" perspective prior to the beginning of the course, which also makes it possible to adopt effective instructional design strategies to improve the quality of online instruction. Once the course is designed and ready to be implemented, instructors can focus on the process of the facilitation and enjoy the interactions with the students.

CHALLENGE
Translating Teaching Styles to the Online Environment

Translating the teaching style to the online environment is a challenge to many faculty. Without physical communication cues in an environment, instructors may find difficulty naturally energizing the online learning environment and empower students to adopt responsibility for their own learning. Since the online environment easily goes unobserved, instructors need to internationally make their teaching styles tangible to the students by design and facilitation through humanizing interactions with students.

OPPORTUNITY The research shows that personalized interaction that takes place between faculty and students plays a major role in the success of online learning. Intentionally translating instructor teaching styles into the online environment leads to increased motivation and improved student engagement.

What are other opportunities in online teaching and learning?

There is little to no difference in grade-based student performance between an online and a face-to-face course (Cavanaugh, J. K. & Jacquemin, S. J., 2015).
More than 7 in 10 faculty members who have taught an online course report that the experience has taught them skills that have improved their teaching. They say it caused them to think more critically about how to engage learners with course content (Lederman, D., 2018 ).
The online modality can improve access, particularly for disadvantaged learners (Bailey, A, et. al., 2018).

In reality, the experience of teaching and learning is what you make of it, both online and face-to-face. It’s not the modality that matters as much as the effort, planning, and commitment of the instructor to create the best experience they can for their learners. The online experience can be rewarding for both learners and instructors.

Reference

Kebritchi, Mansureh & Lipschuetz, Angie & Santiague, Lilia. (2017). Issues and Challenges for Teaching Successful Online Courses in Higher Education: A Literature Review. Journal of Educational Technology Systems. 46. 4–29. 10.1177/0047239516661713.