Set up your home office. If you are going to work from home, you need to have a designated work space. Even though your students will interact with you and submit their work electronically, you will still need a place to organize files and paperwork. If you want to be able to help your students, you have to be able to find the information you need. Setting up your home office will give you a base of operations for your online classes.
Establish course policies and procedures. In most cases, online courses are pre-fabricated. This means that you will facilitate your students' learning, but you will not be the one creating course content. However, you will still need to establish policies for students' grading, academic dishonesty, deadlines and course communication.
Check with your college or university before putting policies into place. Chances are, the university will have policies you will be expected to follow. You can begin with those policies as guidelines and add to them, but make sure you do not stray from them or leave them out as you facilitate a course. (For instance, if the university gives students one week to submit assignments, do not create a policy where they only have two days to submit work.)
Establishing clear policies at the start of a course will make the navigation of the course easier for you and your students.
Keep in regular contact with students. Since you will not see your students in person on a regular basis, you need to be accessible to them in other ways. Give students a contact phone number on the first day of the course, and set regular hours for students to call you. You will probably want to limit the time of day students may call; for example, you might say you do not wish to be called after 9 p.m. If you give out your number, you need to be able to answer that number when students call you during your specified hours. If you want to be away from home, you may want to consider providing a cellular number instead of a land line.
Email will be another popular method for students to communicate with you. There may also be specific messaging options on the program you use for online learning. You should check your email and course messages several times per day, and respond within 24 hours to any student request for feedback or assistance. If your course includes a discussion board forum, you should also post to the forum to let students know you are monitoring and participating in their class discussions.
Provide grades and feedback in a timely manner. Make sure that students are aware, well in advance, of upcoming assignments and the process to submit them to you. Once assignments are submitted, grade them as soon as you can. In addition to providing a lettered or numeric grade, you should add feedback commentary to the first few assignments, at least, if you can. Students in an online class may be unfamiliar with the environment, and may feel anxious about how they will earn their grades. Giving students feedback after their first paper or other assignment can help them gain the confidence to perform well on future assignments.
Since online courses generally have weekly assignments for students, you should strive to give back graded work within one week of submission. This way, a student gets feedback from you before he has to continue to submit assignments. In case there are discrepancies between student performance and your expectations, you can clear them up early on in the course to prevent future miscommunications or errors.
Take diversity into account. Remember, students in an online course will come in many forms. Some will be traditional college students, while others will be working adults. Some may be first-time learners while others are continuing their education. They will be of all ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds. When working with your students, you will have to bear in mind that they each approach your course with a different frame of reference. Try to remember that and work with each student as an individual. This can be difficult when you do not physically see them every day and visually recognize their differences. Personal contact and attention from a teacher does not have to be lost in an online learning environment; in fact, it can be the key to student success.