The Key to Customized Online Education

One word...adapt.

Just like a classroom teacher, the online educator needs to possess the ability to adapt quickly in order to provide the best learning experience for the student.

Just like a classroom teacher, well-planned lessons may not go as so aptly as they were planned.

Adapting your online lesson for the student may
mean simply tossing the lesson altogether!

I always go into a session with a lesson plan in hand, but I adapt those plans to fit the learner. That may mean even switching to a different subject, if he is needing help in math that day more than he needs for us to continue strengthening his reading comprehension skills. In other words, the teacher has to be willing to just dump those lesson plans to quickly assess where the student is struggling and improvise a new lesson.

This is probably more frequent with online teaching, than classroom teaching, because a huge percentage of online teaching is homework help. If a student needs help understanding his homework, I would fail as a teacher to insist we work on the lesson I had planned. He needs to understand the concept being taught in the homework to be able to walk into class the next day feeling successful. So, as an online teacher, I wing it far more often than when I was a classroom teacher.

The result? A learner who feels his teacher is there to help him...not simply push her agenda on him.