Time Management for Online Instructors

The time demands of teaching online can be overwhelming, but there are techniques that can greatly reduce the amount of time you need to spend in your online courses without sacrificing quality.

Course design

Time management should begin with course design. Providing clear instructions and easy navigation will reduce the amount of time spent answering the students’ questions about course logistics, says Mary Ellen Bornak, instructional designer at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.

Bornak also says that the course objectives, content, and assessment need to be aligned. “In other words, what you are testing them on and what they are demonstrating to you is what they learned. The action and interaction in the course is all about the same information.”

To further improve clarity, Bornak recommends explaining to students

·        how the course will proceed

·        how learning is going to occur in the course

·        how they will exchange ideas with each other

·        how they will demonstrate that they understand the material

·        how they will demonstrate how they’re going to use this new knowledge

·        where to get help.

One aspect of providing clear instructions is minimizing the amount of text that students have to scroll through. This means that whenever possible put instructions in bulleted-list form rather than long paragraphs because people read things on the Web differently than they do in print.

“On every level, things need to be clear to the student, from the overall learning plan to specific assignment instructions. The clearer you can make them up front, the better off you’re going to be,” says Georglyn Davidson, director of online learning at BCCC. “Don’t use a lot of text. Instead of paragraphs, use bulleted, step-by-step instructions because students are used to looking at the Web and picking out things differently that the way they did before.”

“It’s a given that the navigation of the course needs to be clear,” Davidson says. “It needs to be easy for the students to know where to go in the course so they’re not struggling to find things that are buried five links down. Student also need to know where to go for help and that if they have technical problems, the instructor is not the go-to person for that all the time. There might be other resources. If there are other places students should go for help, make them very easy for students to find.” 

Establish parameters

Online learners often have unrealistic expectations of instructor availability and response time. Setting realistic parameters that state specifically when you are available for office hours, how often you will check e-mail, when you will post to the discussion board, and when students can expect graded assignments returned will greatly reduce the number of e-mail messages you get from students requesting something from you.

It’s also important to stick to the parameters. There can be a strong temptation to increase your participation in a threaded discussion when that discussion is particularly interesting. Although this can improve the discussion, Davidson warns not to give in to the temptation to post more frequently because students will then expect you to post more frequently in subsequent discussions.

Anticipate students’ questions

As you teach a course each semester, compile a list of answers to commonly asked questions in a Word document from which you can copy and paste. This saves the time of having to retype information you know you will reuse. Putting the information in Word enables you to copy and paste it into whatever communication tool you happen to be using—chat, e-mail, or threaded discussion, Davidson says.

Manage e-mail

Bornak and Davidson recommend using an e-mail account that is dedicated to a single course; however, if you don’t, make sure that students include a designated course title in the subject line of each e-mail message related to the course and then filter it to one folder.

Manage threaded discussions

The instructor does not necessarily need to be the one to facilitate threaded discussions. By taking a step back and letting students facilitate discussions, you can empower students to take control of their own learning while reducing the amount of time you spend in threaded discussions. This does not mean that you should let students take full control, but instead of having to respond to everything in the discussion, try monitoring, guiding, and making sure students are on track, Davidson says.

Bornak recommends creating discussion topic folders so threaded discussions are not all over the board, and if students go off on a tangent, create a new folder to address that topic while maintaining the original thread.

Use more efficient grading techniques

Davidson recommends using AutoCorrect tools in Word to provide feedback on written assignments. These allow you to create standard comments that can be inserted into an assignment, saving the time it takes to retype them in each instance.

Although this type of standardized feedback can save time, students should also receive specific feedback. One way to do this is by inserting audio comments into Word documents. These audio comments can provide explanations that would be more time consuming if typed. “[Audio comments] also are a very effective way to provide teacher presence in online courses. Hearing a voice is another pathway to the brain. A student may understand a comment better by hearing it rather than reading it,” Bornak says.

Contact Georglyn Davidson at davidson@bucks.edu and Mary Ellen Bornak at bornakm@bucks.edu.