Managing online courses can be tough – but completely necessary. Nowadays, more and more students are opting to learn online. In fact, 3.4 million college students have chosen to study completely online. It is continually growing and it is evident that there is a need for elearning developers to keep on improving the courses being offered. To do that, you need to be able to manage and monitor it so you will know how effective the course will be. If not, you might not know if the course was successful or not. It will be hard to identify what works and what does not.
Of course, managing elearning courses can be quite challenging. There are so many factors for you to consider to be able to effectively and efficiently manage online courses. But the task becomes easier once you have the right tools that will help you do it. While there are several tools online, you need to concentrate on the specific qualities that you need to look for in these tools.
Qualities of the tools you can use to manage online courses
So what are the qualities that you need to look for in order to find the right tools that will help you manage your elearning courses?
Flexible online collaboration
First of all, it has to allow a decent online collaboration. This is actually the easiest to find because all tools probably have this feature. After all, you are working online. There has to be a way to communicate or collaborate online. Regardless of where you are, your team of elearning developers, and the online students, you should have a means to communicate. The tool that you should choose must have a good one to help keep misunderstanding miscommunication from happening. It should allow you to customize learning workflows, communicate through chat, and even share files, images, and documents. This will help make planning, observations, feedback, and data gathering easier.
Capabilities for online meetings
Working on online courses will require you to talk and meet with the whole team. Because of this, you need to have a platform where you can meet and discuss in private. This will allow you to brainstorm and discuss your ideas. It should also be a great way to track the progress of the project. This platform should allow conferencing to happen across multiple devices. Being allowed to conduct video conferences should be a good feature but the ability to share screens would probably be more useful. Recording features will also come in handy so you can replay what was discussed during the meeting.
Real-time chat
This is another feature that will help strengthen communication. A live chat feature will help everyone connect anytime. There should be an option to set up a private message in case you need to discuss something confidential that you do not want the whole team to know. This can be used, not just for the elearning team but also for the online students. This will make discussions more engaging.
Efficient note-taking
Finally, you want to find a tool that will allow you to take notes and allow the rest of the team to search for it. This will be useful when trying to backtrack information or monitor the progress of the elearning course. It has to be flexible and available to access through mobile devices. This tool should also help you be more organized with all the notes involved in every project.
It is important to realize that you do not have to confine yourself to one tool. You can use more than one tool that exhibits one or two of the qualities. If you have all of these, you should be able to manage online courses without a hitch.