A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach Online: Watch the Lectures Online

Ear­li­er this month, Stan­ford’s Online High School offered (in part­ner­ship with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies) a free, five-day course “Teach Your Class Online: The Essen­tials.” With many schools start­ing the next aca­d­e­m­ic year online, this course found a large audi­ence. 7,000 teach­ers signed up. Aimed at mid­dle and high school teach­ers, the course cov­ered “gen­er­al guide­lines for adapt­ing your course to an online for­mat, best prac­tices for var­ied sit­u­a­tions, com­mon pit­falls in online course design, and how to trou­bleshoot stu­dent issues online.”

The videos from “Teach Your Class Online: The Essen­tials” are all now avail­able online. You can watch them in sequen­tial order, mov­ing from top to bot­tom, here. Or watch them on this Stan­ford host­ed page. Day 1 (above) pro­vides a gen­er­al intro­duc­tion to teach­ing online. See top­ics cov­ered in Days 2–5 below.

Please feel free to share these videos with any teach­ers. And if any­one watch­es these lec­tures and takes good class notes (ones oth­er teach­ers can use), please let us know. We would be hap­py to help share them with oth­er teach­ers.

Final­ly, just to give you a lit­tle back­ground, Stan­ford’s Online High School has oper­at­ed as a ful­ly-online, inde­pen­dent, accred­it­ed high school since 2006. Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­vides open enroll­ment cours­es to adults world­wide. All of its cours­es are cur­rent­ly online. For any­one inter­est­ed, Cours­era also offers a spe­cial­iza­tion (a series of five cours­es) on online learn­ing called the Vir­tu­al Teacher. It can be explored here.

Day 2

• Get­ting Spe­cif­ic: Sit­u­a­tions and Tools
• Sci­ence: Labs in Online Ped­a­gogy

Day 3

• Online Class­room Exam­ple Clips
• Build­ing and Main­tain­ing a Class­room
  Com­mu­ni­ty

Day 4

• Review of Sub­mit­ted Sam­ple Les­son Drafts
• Trou­bleshoot­ing Obsta­cles to Suc­cess in the Online Envi­ron­ment

Day 5

• Math: Using Writ­ing Tablets and White­boards
• Mod­ern Lan­guages: Tips for High­ly Inter­ac­tive Class Dur­ing Which Stu­dents Active­ly Speak and Write in the Tar­get Lan­guage
• Human­i­ties: Pro­duc­tive Class­room Con­ver­sa­tions About Chal­leng­ing Sub­jects
• Clos­ing Thoughts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

How Schools Can Start Teach­ing Online in a Short Peri­od of Time: Free Tuto­ri­als from the Stan­ford Online High School

“I Will Sur­vive,” the Coro­n­avirus Ver­sion for Teach­ers Going Online