Traditionally, teaching styles have been broken into five categories: Expert, Formal Authority, Personal Model, Facilitator and Delegator. The Experts use their superior knowledge to gain authority and strive to challenge students to become experts themselves. The Formal Authority model is concerned with traditional teaching structures and ways of grading and determining success or failure. The Personal Model focuses on the behavior of the instructor and encourages students to observe and model actions, behaviors and methods. The Facilitator is focused on using conversations and questions to help students to reach an understanding of a topic. The Delegator encourages students to be autonomous by giving them activities and projects and offering instructor help if needed. Many instructors use a blend of these styles, though often one teaching style is dominant.
Although the above traditional teaching styles apply to online teaching, online teaching has some specific challenges. Since online students do not have access to their teachers in person, students need to have very clear, specific and time-based instruction with frequent feedback and quick turnaround times in grading. In an online environment, students are not as reliant on the teacher as an "expert"-- they often has access to lectures, links and videos that even-out the intellectual playing ground between instructor and student. Although student autonomy in the classroom is an asset, it can also be a challenge: students can often feel that the instructor is not present or does not care if the instructor does not actively participate in the online classroom or send reminders of assignments or activities.
With knowledge of the benefits and challenges in online teaching, an instructor is better equipped to decide their teaching style based on the five traditional categories. Since online courses often offer a highly-structured classroom with specific tasks due on specific days, the Formal Authority style, with its focus on guidelines and structure, can be effective. Since students will be working by themselves, often through message boards or other independent methods, the Facilitator style can help to guide students in an online environment through discussion board discussions and chat. The discussion board also allows instructors to use the Personal Model by modeling how to engage in a professional and intellectual conversation.
An individual's teaching style depends on his or her beliefs about what an educator is and how they should wield authority in the classroom. These considerations are important when building an online teaching style, but it is also crucial to take into account the modality of teaching and how that can affect student success. By considering both teaching philosophy as well as the changing world of online education, an instructor can better understand what teaching style to adopt.