Almost anyone who has significant experience with teaching will know that there is more to teaching than simply sharing content with student. There is a whole other world of grading, planning, and other tasks that need to be address so that learning can happen when it is time to teach. However, in my experience these other tasks are often neglected when people have to teach in an online setting. Therefore, we will look at some of these management task that need to be dealt with online just as they are in a face-to-face setting. These management task are

• Communication
• Task monitoring
• Time management

Communication

Communication probably appears to be an obvious thing to do when teaching. In the classroom, this is true. This is because students can ask questions and the teacher can try to clarify things if students look confused. The ability to see each other helps to encourage communication in many situations. However, in an online setting, I have seen teachers wait for students to contact them and then the teachers are slow to respond if they respond at all. For some teachers, if there is silence it means that the students are ok. This can lead to disengaged or highly anxious students who do not know what to do are what is expected of them.

When teaching online it is important to be proactive with communication. A teacher should not wait for students to come to him but should post messages to the whole class and individual students. For example, a teacher might send a message to all the students in a class every morning just as a way to check in by expecting the students to respond to the message. This helps students to believe they are a part of a class and not just socially isolated.

In addition, struggling students need additional support. An online teachers needs to contact a student when the fail to complete an assignment. In a face-to-face setting, a teacher might talk to a struggling student. However, in an online setting this form of intervention can be forgotten which will generally make the situation worst. This type of support must continue through contacting the student to try and assess the source of difficulty for the student.

A second form of communication is providing feedback through timely grading of assignments. This is often ignored when teaching face-to-face but this can be a real disaster when grading assignments is neglected in an online setting. The feedback from the grades is another way to connect with the students. Since in person communication may not be possible it is doubly critical that students know their academic progress or lack thereof.

Task Monitoring

Task monitoring has to do with the students being able to see which assignments they have completed and which ones they still need to do. How this can be done varies from lms to lms. However, most lms have a way in which the system will place check marks next to completed assignments. In Moodle, this is done by setting up the activity completion feature inside a course.

For tracking progress for the entire course, it may be possible to setup some form of a progress bar that students can see. As the bar nears completion it can help to motivate students. One tool in Moodle is the the activity completion block that tells the students how many activities the have completed as well as the total number of activities in a course.

What both of the two suggestion above have in common is that they don’t require a lot of work by the teacher. Once there setup, these two ideas take care of themselves. Instead of watching the activity completion, the teacher should be encouraging students to look at these tools and followup with students who do not complete assignments.

Time Management

Time management is another task that is monitored naturally in a traditional teaching setting but is ignored in an online setting. It is common in my experience for new online teachers to provide too much content and assignments. This is due in part to the fact they are not cognizant of how much time an assignment or content should take for students to absorb or respond to.

One tool that can help with this is to use the calendar that is available in the lms. When this is done the teacher can see how much they want the students to do on a certain day. It is also beneficial to make a mental note of how long a teacher thinks something will take to do when teaching online.

Another tool that can be consider is using some form of tool that announces assignments that are due soon. For example, Moodle has a block called “upcoming events” which shares the assignments that are closes to being due. This helps students to prioritize what they need to be focusing on. It is important to note that at least in Moodle that the upcoming events block will not work unless the calendar is being used. Using the calendar is not hard but requires a great deal of discipline to constantly update which is hard to find in most people.

Conclusion

Classroom management online takes awareness from the teacher to understand the large amount of structure that students require in order to learn. Putting the mechanism here in place can help to reduce some of the anxiety that students have when learning online. This anxiety comes from the lack of connection they have with the teacher and others in the class. By communicating, monitoring, and managing time effectively students can have success when learning online.