Given the unique dynamic of an online class, intentional effort must be made to support students through regular and ongoing feedback. These principles can shape your way forward:

1. Be Timely and Responsive

At the risk of repeating this point too often, let me reinforce the importance of being available to answer questions and to help students know how well they are doing in the class. When you teach in person, students know where and when to find you, and, importantly, they have also committed to that meeting time in their schedules. The same is not true in an online class. Reduce student anxiety by being responsive to questions and returning assessments as soon as is reasonable. Explicitly state in your syllabus when students should expect you to reply to emails and return graded work. If you become unexpectedly unavailable, let them know. Explain why and when you’ll be back. A little transparency goes a long way. Make yourself accessible for students. The payoff – increased student commitment and effort – will be well worthwhile.

2. Take Advantage of the Tech

We can do many things more effectively when teaching online than we can when teaching in person. Using technology to provide highly efficient yet powerfully meaningful feedback is one of them. Put the affordances of technology tools to work for you. Take advantage of embedded or readily available technologies such as LMS rubrics, audio- or video-recording capabilities, and even the oft-forgotten phone to communicate with both efficiency and impact. You can give individuals targeted specific input on their work. Doing so doesn’t have to dominate your schedule when you apply the right tech tools to the task.

3. Put Yourself in Your Students’ Shoes

Think of situations in which you’ve been anxious about your performance – such as from your own student experience, or from waiting for the peer review comments on the article you’ve submitted to a respected journal in your field. Perhaps in your employment, your supervisor is opaque; you don’t have a sense of how you are doing or where you may need to improve. Not receiving guidance or timely answers, not having a clear sense of your standing in a situation, can increase anxiety. Equip your students for their best success by calling to mind how it feels when you lack the input you need to move forward productively. Demonstrate empathy and caring by being available to help.

Excerpted and adapted from Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby and James M. Lang. Copyright © 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.