Challenges and Surprises: A Veteran Teacher First Time Teaching Online

As offerings of online and hybrid courses continue to increase in academia, it is more likely that instructors who have no previous experience in distance education or e-learning will be assigned to teach an online course. Regardless of the numbers of years of face-to-face teaching experience the instructor may have, the first online teaching assignment can be daunting. This paper presents some of the concerns that teachers may face–and how to address them–by sharing the experience of a veteran teacher’s first time teaching online. The course was developed with the support of an instructional design and web development team. We present the teacher’s main concerns before teaching the course, how they were addressed during the course development process, some design iterations once the teaching process actually started, and preliminary feedback from anonymous mid-semester evaluations. Although this case cannot be generalized to the entire population of first-time online teachers, it can offer encouraging insights to veteran instructors teaching for the first time online, deepening understanding of the challenges of online learning environments. This paper provides new insight into the complex process of combining online teaching with a veteran teacher’s assumptions about what constitutes effective teaching practices of community, interaction, and rapport in the classroom.