Louisa Ha

The teaching of whether you should teach an online class or not came into perspective. Teaching an online class is not always the easiest thing to do there are many Do’s & Don’ts. Louisa Ha is a Professor of Telecommunications at Bowling Green State University gives her take on teaching online classes and how to be successful at it.

Ha mainly teaches graduate students in sales, media programming, and social media. She not only teaches online classes but face-to-face classes as well. She teaches five online classes Minorities in Video and Film and Media Sales and Promotions in the Summer. Ha teaches Media Policy and Industry and Advertising Theory and Practice in the Spring. She also teaches one class in the Fall which is Media Programming.

The advantages of online classes are serving non-traditional student population and inflexibility in course offering and scheduling to different types as students such as for kids with disabilities or even athletes. There is also the fact that students get to be enrolled and summer and are able to expand geographical coverage so you may take the class wherever you want. You gain centralized data for assessment and it;s serves as an example for other faculty members.

Ha specifically went to into detail about managing online classes from a faculty, working mother, and a researcher/media. When it comes to being a faculty member you teach more good students and they take responsibility for learning at their own place. You can quickly identify lazy students from the students who work hard and monetary incentives provided by the university to develop/teach online courses.You are much less vulnerable to low enrollment and ease of duplicating and repeat of teaching the course. it is also an opportunity to invite guest speakers from all over the world and it’s a highly remarkable skill.

Ha is also a working mother and gets advantages for that as well such as flexibility with the schedule and can prepare materials much more in advance. One of the good things about online classes as a working mother is not worrying about whether they’ll make to class because of weather conditions. The benefits of being a researcher is the multimedia mass medium and rich data that can be used and analyzed for assessment. You can also test for different online materials.

The difference between online classes and face-to-face classes are that online class give you a more open learning environment. Grading is easy computer training compared to manual grading of face-to-face classes.The facilities are more diverse online compared to face-to-face is more standardized.

The challenges of online teaching is the grading load can be enormous if not managed well and everything is written and on record. The audio-visual design of online materials and mastery of the online teaching software and online tools. The student expectations and email overload can be overwhelmed.

Lastly, I’m going to talk about the Do’s and Don’ts about online teaching. The Do’s are use simple common online tools and avoid group assignments. Avoid live events for group students, utilize computer-aided grading, and organize your materials usually in modules for easy retrieval and navigation. Make sure to establish an easy to remember routine course calendar for assignments, provide FAQs for complex designs, and keep separate folders for emails by course semester.

The type of people who shouldn’t teach online classes have to be teaching only as a live performer and if you like to crack jokes and small talk it’s not for you. If you are not god at responding to emails and don’t want to learn the online course management software.

Teaching online classes can be beneficial but they have their challenges but if it’s the right choice for you, you should take it.