How to Teach Online

3 Ways to inspire learners

All of a sudden, there are multiple courses, gurus and books on how to teach online. We might be tackling a pandemic, but there is no denying that humanity’s entrepreneurial urges have not been diminished. Hooray for that!

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I’ve been doing a ton of practical experiments as far as online teaching is concerned, and this is what I have found works best:

1. Schedule short sessions with plenty of breaks: The science is pretty clear on one thing — the worst thing one can do is to labour on about a topic children probably don’t have much interest in for eons and eons. Movement helps with brain activity and in turn, super charges the learning that can happen. Scheduling sufficient breaks, even if just for a walk, can do wonders to attention and the information that the children take away. Also, Wilbert McKeachie, a well regarded educator, is of the opinion that attention typically increases from the beginning of a lecture to 10 minutes into the lecture and then starts to reduce after that point. So, if you have a class which is 45 minutes long, you better be prepared for attention to start waning around the ten minute mark. Not to worry though — as long as you have strategies up your sleeve to infuse the session with some humor or other form of emotional surprise, attention will then start to go up.
2. Stimulate more of the senses: John Medina, a brain researcher, is a fan of multi-sensorial learning. For good reason! As such, at Tinkerbola, we try to use physical material in our classes, in addition to the online tools at our disposal. This material adds another dimension to the learning and stimulates more than just the eyes and the ears. The more multi-sensorial a lesson, the greater the speed with which muscles react to the stimuli. With multi-sensorial inputs, the brain’s threshold for detecting stimuli also increases. This makes sense even when seen from an evolutionary standpoint — we evolved in a multi-sensorial environment and so our learning abilities are more optimised for a multi-sensorial environment. Multimedia presentations, videos, images, GIFs and sound bites all add to the multi-dimensionality of sensory input.
3. Make it interesting: When was the last time you paid attention to something boring? Yea, exactly. Humans are wired to pay attention to things that stimulate them emotionally, physically and intellectually. It has to be exciting. It has to evoke some longing for experience. It has to transport the learner to a place in their mind where they want to be. The brain is the most complex organ in the body (it certainly is the most fascinating). According to John Medina, the more attention it pays to a stimulus, the more elaborately information is learner and retained. As such, online teaching has get the learner emotionally charged. The last time I checked, a slide deck which repeats information already present in a textbook is not likely to make a learner jump in excitement.

That’s it for now!

Stay tuned for more content, as we run more interesting experiments at Tinkerbola.

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