What Makes a Good Online Instructor?

I’ve been pondering more and more what it takes to be a good online teacher as I reflect on the relative successes and challenges that face the teachers at our school.  One thing is for sure.  It is not easy to be a quality online instructor where you truly teach your students.  It’s fairly easy to post a series of assignments up to a learning management system and then contact students who are not doing the work, but then where is the teaching in that?  Here are a few things that I think are key to being a quality online instructor:

A passion for helping kids and helping kids learn: This is kind of critical to all types of teaching, but because your students are not there in front of you, this trait becomes all the more important.  In an online world you don’t have to deal with discipline problems; in fact, if you didn’t care whether your students passed or failed, then having most of your students fail would be easier than in a regular classroom.  The students in an online class can much more easily just not go online and then for the teacher that means one less set of assignments to grade.  But if you are a teacher who truly cares about kids then you have to find creative ways to connect to kids and develop a relationship with your students.  You have to really want to make your online lessons engaging and interesting to students.

A belief that online education offers the opportunity to do things differently in education and a commitment to do things differently: The world is changing very rapidly. Our educational system, unfortunately lags behind it.  Many teachers complain about the lack of access to technology in schools.  Inherent in an online schooling environment is access to technology, but if all you are going to have students do is do the same things they would do if they didn’t have access to technology then you are doing a disservice to the students and really have no place being an online teacher.

Creative and innovative nature: Having a lot of creativity and a passion for innovation is another is another critical aspect of online teaching.  There are so many new technology tools and new ones being created every day.  The possibility of utilizing them must be exciting to you.  I think a quality online teacher must always want to take their courses to the next level to keep them on the cutting edge.
Although many of the same qualities that make a good instructor in the brick-and-mortar classroom certainly apply to online teaching.  The 3 skills listed above are essential for anyone considering being an online instructor.
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